2015 Program – Abstracts - North American Society for Social [PDF]

Panels (in chronological order) Panel on service learning Karen Adkins Regis University Teaching Justice through Service Learning Abigail Gosselin Regis University Teaching Justice through Service Learning Jason Taylor Regis University Teaching Justice through Service Learning We present a panel in which the three of us discuss the value of service learning as a way to teach justice, and the successes and challenges we have experienced with this. Our format will be a roundtable discussion in which we take turns presenting our ideas and responding to each other. We intend to use about half of our allotted time for our presentation and the other half for an open discussion with the audience. Our panel discussion will be tightly organized as follows. We will begin by explaining what service learning is and how it can be incorporated into philosophy courses where teaching justice is a central goal. Students' typical experience with service is as a nice way to help the community. Service that is tightly connected with course content, however, can provide a unique learning opportunity that makes circumstances of justice lived realities rather than abstract notions. The experience of ongoing interactions and the development of relationships with others provide a basis for exploring empirical information and theoretical concepts about justice that go beyond what reading and discussion can do. In this section we will also talk briefly about what university infrastructure is required to make service learning successful and how faculty can address challenges that arise from insufficient infrastructure. Next we will explain why doing service is an important way to teach justice. We have the advantage of teaching at a Jesuit institution, where teaching frequently involves cultivating substantive Jesuit values which include ethical inquiry, concern for social justice, and the formation of men and women in the service of others. Among the goals of our classes is the cultivation of an orientation toward service as well as various virtues and dispositions that connect with this orientation. Through service students develop an understanding of their own social situatedness and learn dispositions of listening, attentiveness, and responsiveness which enable them to work toward justice. We recognize that cultivating character traits is more complicated in courses taught at public institutions and will discuss this difference.

2 Finally, we will share our specific experiences with incorporating service into our courses. One of us will discuss a two-semester course sequence for freshmen called EnRoute, which uses service as a thread that connects the teaching of writing, communications skills, and introductory philosophy for the purposes of teaching students how to confront issues of justice. Another of us will discuss a pragmatism course in which students learned about the significance of social situatedness for knowledge in relation to their ongoing work as teacher's helpers in elementary school classrooms. Finally, another of us will discuss a political philosophy course on freedom and social transformation to highlight the role that community partners and partnering can play in philosophically-oriented justice education. In describing our experiences, we will compare our syllabi and assignments in these courses with those from comparable courses that do not incorporate service in order to demonstrate what service as pedagogy can accomplish.

Conversation with the Author: Tom Digby LOVE AND WAR: HOW MILITARISM SHAPES SEXUALITY AND ROMANCE by Tom Digby Sarah Clark Miller, Penn State University David Reese, Georgetown University Anna Gotlib, Brooklyn College CUNY Ideas of masculinity and femininity become sharply defined in war-reliant societies, resulting in a presumed enmity between men and women. This so-called "battle of the sexes" is intensified by the use of misogyny to encourage men and boys to conform to the demands of masculinity. These are among Tom Digby's fascinating insights shared in Love and War, which describes the making and manipulation of gender in militaristic societies and the sweeping consequences for men and women in their personal, romantic, sexual, and professional lives. Drawing on cross-cultural comparisons and examples from popular media, including sports culture, the rise of "gonzo" and "bangbus" pornography, and "internet trolls," Digby describes how the hatred of women and the suppression of empathy are used to define masculinity, thereby undermining relations between women and men--sometimes even to the extent of violence. Employing diverse philosophical methodologies, he identifies the cultural elements that contribute to heterosexual antagonism, such as an enduring faith in male force to solve problems, the glorification of violent men who suppress caring emotions, the devaluation of men's physical and emotional lives, an imaginary gender binary, male privilege premised on the subordination of women, and the use of misogyny to encourage masculine behavior. Digby tracks the "collateral damage" of this disabling misogyny in the lives of both men and women, but ends on a hopeful note. He ultimately finds the link between war and gender to be

3 dissolving in many societies: war is becoming slowly de-gendered, and gender is becoming slowly de-militarized.

Panel on the work of Nel Noddings Ruth E. Groenhout Calvin College Noddings Among the Philosophers In her paper titled “Epistemic Trust and Social Location” Nancy Daukas does a wonderful job of developing an analysis of epistemic trustworthiness and social exclusion, and the ways that unjust power relations normalize practices of epistemic exclusion (Daukas, 2006). The issues raised by Daukas are not just academic, but have profound ramifications for thinking about our epistemic responsibilities inside and outside the academy, for how we structure basic professional practices (hiring, promotion, and the like) and for developing strategies for changing profoundly unjust social systems. This is particularly relevant to the practice of philosophy. Philosophy as a professional field has recently discovered that it has a “woman problem”. Websites detail sexist and unethical treatment of women by their professional peers, and studies demonstrate that both men and women unconsciously assume that men are more suited to do philosophy than women (Will, 2015). When women are not seen as legitimate when they speak as philosophers, and when they are assumed to lack the authority to contribute to the debates and professional disputes within philosophy, it is obvious that the situation is unjust. But changing the situation requires more than the recognition that there is a problem. But openness to alternative perspectives does not happen naturally. In this paper I argue that Noddings’ work, in particular, has the resources for generating a new philosophy, one that privileges attentiveness and openness to others, but that the resistance of mainstream philosophy to accepting her work is both philosophically and practically an example of epistemic closure at work. Noddings was tremendously important for my own development as a feminist scholar in graduate school. I found Caring on the library bookshelves, and in spite of being told quite sternly by my advisor that it wasn’t even worth reading, discovered that it identified serious gaps in what I was getting in graduate school. I’d like to weave together some of that personal experience with the theme (from the conference organizers) of epistemologies of privilege and ignorance in education. Given the current gender issues Philosophy as a discipline faces, my sense is that my experience is anything but unusual, and it’s a nice case study for thinking about how difficult it is to change a culture that treats any woman who speaks as a woman with disdain. But at the same time, the basic structure of an ethics of care, applied to philosophical practices, is one that has the potential to both improve the situation of women and other

4 under-represented minorities, and the potential to improve philosophical practice itself. A care perspective requires an attitude of humility and attentiveness to the other, both of which are very foreign to contemporary Anglo-analytic philosophy, and that attitude is one that would profoundly change both the membership of, and the practice of philosophy. Bibliography: Daukas, Nancy. 2006. “Epistemic Trust and Social Location”, Episteme 3(1-2): 109-124; Will, Madeline. 2015.“Disciplines that expect ‘brilliance’ tend to punish women, study finds” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 5, 2015).

Maurice Hamington University of Oregon/Lane Community College “The Student is More Important Than the Subject”: Nel Noddings, Care, and Emergent Normativity Popular culture often perpetuates a perception of educational experiences as trivial and removed from the reality of social existence. Many times, fictional teachers, particularly college teachers, are caricatured in movies and television shows as harsh, egotistical content experts driven by a right or wrong morality. Unfortunately, such caricatures have a way of seeping into social consciousness and reinforce a certain anti-intellectualism. In her tremendous corpus of work, Nel Noddings uniquely reframes education as a joyful experience that prepares students for the emotional intelligence needed for the relational life as members of a cosmopolitan society. For Noddings, education is not a bounded and segregated experience but exists in continuity with lifelong interpersonal habits of being that she describes as caring. At a time in history when Western modernist categories and structures of ethics appear increasingly unsatisfactory to address complex personal and political challenges, Noddings offers a true paradigm shift that in many ways elides the boundaries of ethics, ontology, epistemology, and, as is explored in this paper, pedagogy. In particular, I address how Noddings’ concepts of engrossment and responsiveness in a caring relationship, including those of student-teacher, inform a notion of emergent normativity that has implications not only for ethical theory but how we engage intersectional difference to make common cause. Ultimately, this is a paper about privilege and humility in service of positive relationships. I begin by reviewing what Noddings has to say about teacher student relationships as well as the relationship of the caregiver and the cared for with particular attention to the role of power in those relationships. Given the criticism that care ethics has received for favoring familiar and familial relationships, the student-teacher relationship is a significant model for engaging lesser known others in society. I argue that Noddings’ work importantly integrates self-authorship, knowledge creation, and moral habit development in a holistic theory that is much more than a traditional normative theory of right and wrong. However, although care has a particularist dimension, it is not subjective. There is indeed a normative character to care, but not in the sense of preordained actions abstracted from the context and relationships involved. Noddings gestures toward an emergent normativity that not only transforms student-teacher relationships but also reframes values in our interpersonal and political relationships. The humility that caring teachers are asked to bring to the classroom in

5 assuming the best intention as well as the cognitive, emotional, and experiential resources of every student mirrors the habits that everyone need to bring to their social relations. If normativity is truly emergent then moral education is about developing the ability to be responsive and understanding of unfamiliar others. These abilities support an expansive notion of critical thinking skills to include emotive and empathetic elements as well as a means for taking ownership of one’s moral identity. In this manner, education becomes far more important than learning discipline content, it is a means to finding humanity.

Maureen Sander-Staudt Southwest Minnesota State University Reciprocity as Developmental Virtue and Ideal of Justice in the Care Ethic of Nel Noddings The care ethic of Nel Noddings is rightly considered one of the formative influences in the ethic of care. In tracing the ways in which the work of care gives rise to moral ideals and practices, her work not only has given fundamental shape to care ethics, but has deftly shown its relevance to all levels of relationship, from the intimate to the international. One of the common critiques of Noddings’ ethic has been that it ignores relations of power and power differentials that can lead to unjust distributions and expectations about the distribution of care work. In this paper I argue that a response to this concern is found in Noddings’ concept of reciprocity, which serves to motivate and rejuvenate the inclination to care. Noddings’ account of reciprocity is characterized by natural spontaneity and mutuality, meaning that it is a response to care that frequently arises without specific intent, and is mutually satisfying to both care giver and receiver. In this respect Nodding’ account of relational reciprocity is confirmed by research on infant empathetic response. However, once it is recognized that reciprocity is a feature of caring relations that can be more or less purposefully developed as a virtue according to a sense of justice, reciprocity as relational ideal can be used to both critique and enhance caring relations that may suffer from unjust patterns of exchange. Distinguishing mutuality from reciprocity shows how exchanges of care can move from being spontaneous and natural responses to more purposeful actions aimed at maintaining equitable balance in care offerings. After considering why reciprocity might be viewed as neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for having care relations that are characterized by justice, and how even reciprocal exchanges of care can be tainted, I will argue that Noddings’ discussion of relational reciprocity can inspire purposeful exchanges of care that enhance relational parity by facilitating mutuality and satisfactory care completion.

Conversation with the Author: Judith Andre Worldly Virtue By Judith Andre My book argues that general discussions of virtue need to be complemented by attention to specific virtues. Each chapter addresses a single virtue, most of them traditional (e.g., honesty, generosity, and humility), but sometimes newly framed: “Earthly virtue," for instance, is

6 related to the more usual “environmental virtue," but differs in substance as well as in name; I distinguish "open hope" from contemporary work on goal-oriented hope. The final essay breaks ground by identifying virtues specific to the fact that we age, virtues I call temporal existential tasks: cherishing the present, making meaning of the past, and investing in a future beyond one's own. Since earlier stages of life present similar challenges, I argue that more attention and honor to elders would benefit everyone. The book draws upon various spiritual traditions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, for what they value and the practices that sustain those values; at times it identifies ways in which each can mislead. The book also draws from contemporary sciences, natural but especially behavioral. Anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, have identified a universal norm of reciprocity; virtuous generosity must respect this need to give back. In another example, new understandings of addiction show it to be a contested concept, one no longer limited to substances but extended to activities, including now the cyber world. Drawing from this work, I argue that temperance requires dealing with pain as much as resisting pleasure. Because no single template applies to every virtue, different questions are asked about each. Nevertheless each chapter addresses the often-neglected question of how the virtue in question is acquired, and how social context can support or impede its acquisition. The book is addressed to philosophers, but may also be of interest in religious studies, for its philosophical development of religious themes. There will be three respondents. Each has submitted separately. Barrett Emerick St. Mary's College of Maryland Caring for Oneself While Practicing Compassion for Others Conversation With the Author Panel on "Worldly Virtue: Moral Ideals and Contemporary Life" by Judith Andre “Worldly Virtue" argues that general discussions of virtue need to be complemented by attention to specific virtues. Each chapter addresses a single virtue, most of them traditional (e.g., honesty, generosity, and humility), and sometimes newly framed (“earthly virtue,” for instance, and “open hope.”) The final essay breaks ground by identifying virtues specific to the fact that we age. The book draws upon various spiritual traditions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, for what they value and the practices that sustain those values; at times it identifies ways in which each can mislead. The book also draws from contemporary sciences, natural but especially behavioral. Anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, have identified a universal norm of reciprocity; virtuous generosity must respect this need to give back. In another example, new understandings of addiction suggest that temperance requires dealing with pain as much as resisting pleasure. Because no single template applies to every virtue, different questions are asked about each. Nevertheless each chapter addresses the often-neglected question of how the virtue in question is acquired, and how social context can support or impede its acquisition. The book is addressed to philosophers,

7 but may also be of interest in religious studies, for its philosophical development of religious themes. ----In this paper I will explore how we are to balance the obligation to be in solidarity with others who are suffering, with the obligation to care for and adequately respect ourselves and our own welfare. (I will rely primarily on chapters four and five of Andre’s book, as well as her earlier paper “The Equal Weight of Self- and OtherRegarding Acts”.) I will focus in particular on the special peril one faces when practicing compassion with others within a context of oppression or injustice, rather than other forms of harm from which they might suffer. Nancy E. Snow Marquette University Living in Hope: Comments on Judith Andre My contribution to this panel on Judith Andre’s book, Worldly Virtue, will consist of engagement with her chapter on “Open Hope.” Since I agree with most of what Andre writes in that chapter, my paper will not critique her work as much as amplify it by exploring the notion of “living in hope.” I explore this idea primarily as found in nursing science studies of chronically and terminally ill patients. I’ll argue that these studies provide the basis for arguing that we can hope not only in the present for the future, but also, in the present for the present. This challenges the assumption that hope is exclusively future-oriented, and, I’ll contend, nicely complements and extends Andre’s conception of open hope. Celeste Harvey Marquette University Conversation with the Author: Judith Andre, about Worldly Virtue (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) This is a proposal for a panel conversation with Judith Andre, author of Worldly Virtue. Other panel members would include Nancy Snow (Marquette University) and Barrett Emerick (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). Judith Andre’s new book, Worldly Virtue (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) argues that general discussions of virtue need to be complemented by attention to specific virtues. Each chapter addresses a single virtue, most of them traditional (e.g., honesty, generosity, and humility), and sometimes newly framed (“earthly virtue,” for instance, and “open hope.”) The final essay breaks ground by identifying virtues specific to the fact that we age. The book draws upon various spiritual traditions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, for what they value and the practices that sustain those values; at times it identifies ways in which each can mislead. The book also draws from contemporary sciences, natural but especially behavioral. Anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, have identified a universal norm of reciprocity; virtuous generosity must respect this need to give back. In another example, new

8 understandings of addiction suggest that temperance requires dealing with pain as much as resisting pleasure. Because no single template applies to every virtue, different questions are asked about each. Nevertheless each chapter addresses the often-neglected question of how the virtue in question is acquired, and how social context can support or impede its acquisition. The book is addressed to philosophers, but may also be of interest in religious studies, for its philosophical development of religious themes. I will address the theoretical (or anti-theoretical?) framework of Andre’s opening chapter, along with her later discussions of philosophical method in the chapter on compassion. In doing so I will relate this to the substantive chapters book-ending the body of the work, “Earthly Virtue”• and “Virtue and Age.”

Individual Presentations (alphabetical by author) Karl Martin Adam Oakland University The Slippery Slope to Justice: An Argument for the Recognition of Polygamy Opponents of the recognition of marriages between same sex couples have traditionally argued, among other things, that we ought not recognize the marriages of same sex couples because if we do, there would be no principled reason not to recognize polygamous marriages (Arkes 2004; Bennett 2004; Finnis 2008; Krauthammer 2004; Krauthammer 2013; Lee and George 2014). In response to this sort of argument, defenders of the right of same sex couples to marry have for the most part accepted the premise that it would be wrong to recognize polygamous marriages, but they have attempted in various ways to show that the reasons we have to recognize marriages between couples of whatever sex do not apply to marriages among more than two people (Corvino 2005; Gher 2008; Rauch 2004a; Rauch 2004b; Sullivan 2004; Wedgewood 1999). This article will argue, however, that defenders of the right of people to marry regardless of the sex of their partners should reject the premise that it would be wrong to recognize polygamous marriages. I shall argue that the opponents of marriage equality are correct that the arguments in favor of recognizing marriage rights regardless of sex do show that we should recognize polygamous marriages. Contrary to the opponents of marriage equality, however, I shall argue that this is not a reason to reject marriages between same sex couples but rather a reason to follow the arguments where they lead and recognize polygamous marriages. I shall begin by addressing the specific arguments offered against polygamy offered by proponents of marriage equality such as John Corvino (2005), Jaime M. Gher (2008, and Johnathan Rauch (2004a; 2004b) as well as by philosophers who are primarily

9 concerned with opposing polygamy rather than advancing marriage equality for same sex couples such as Thom Brooks (2009). These arguments, I shall argue, do not succeed. Whether the state should recognize marriages of any kind at all is controversial, but so long as the state does so, I shall argue that it is wrong to deny this recognition to polygamous families. Using a Youngian analysis of oppression I shall argue that the legal institution of one type of family as the only structure that the state will recognize as a marriage is highly oppressive. Expanding the types of relationships that the state will recognize to include same-sex relationships is, of course, a good thing. I shall argue, however, that as politically expedient as it might be, it is seriously morally wrong for proponents of the right of same sex couples to marry to attempt to secure that right by engaging in further marginalization and cultural imperialism against people with even less socially accepted family structures--namely people in relationships involving more than two parties. Rather than reinforcing societies practice of legitimizing one type of romantic relationship while oppressing people in others by attempting to move from the group of the oppressed to the group of the privileged, advocates for the right of same sex couples should argue for the recognition of all consensual romantic relationships whose members request that recognition.

Dennis Arjo Johnson County Community College The Politics of Moral Education Developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was an active voice in debates about the proper content and methods of moral education, and he was uncommonly explicit in tying this own psychological theory to liberal ideals. In working out the pedagogical implications of his “cognitive developmental" theory of moral growth, Kohlberg situated himself in opposition to two competing approaches which he argued were inferior. This paper explores Kohlberg's attempts to address certain paradoxes that emerge from the deliberate attempt to instill liberal moral and political values in children.

Eric Bayruns The Graduate Center, CUNY Epistemic Injustice & Culpability I argue that circumstantial epistemic bad luck should not exculpate hearers in cases where Fricker believes that circumstantial epistemic bad luck exculpates hearers. In other words, I show that circumstantial epistemic bad luck exculpates in fewer circumstances than Fricker contends. Fricker argues that hearers who undermine speakers qua knowers can be held morally accountable because in certain circumstances they could not know better. I use Jose Medina's thesis of cognitive minimums from his book Epistemic Responsibility to cast doubt on Fricker's exculpatory conditions. Although Medina moves in the right direction, I argue that Medina does not go far enough. I argue that epistemic culpability should track harm more rigidly than both Medina and Fricker countenance. That is, I argue that Fricker's excusing conditions for acts of epistemic injustice are too broad. I suggest that excusing conditions ought to be more narrow or less capacious than Fricker countenances.

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The essay proceeds as follows. In the first section, I give an account of what Fricker calls the central case of testimonial injustice. In the second section, I explain Jose Medina's view that responsible agency entails the satisfaction of what he calls cognitive minimums. In the third section, I use Medina's framework to show that we need not exculpate hearers as Fricker suggests. That is, Medina recognizes that moral accountability should rigidly track harm if we want less instances of epistemic-lacunae-caused-injury. In the fourth section, I argue that although Medina's framework is preferable to Fricker's, his emphasis of community culpability over individual culpability is in tension with his assertion that culpability ought to rigidly track harm. Last, I show that there is a tension between Fricker's notion of identity-prejudice and her notion of excusing conditions. That is, I show that it is not clear that her notion of identityprejudice can obtain if her excusing conditions obtain.

Andria Bianchi University of Waterloo Autonomy, Sexuality, and Intellectual Disability Autonomy is a critical component to living a life that is appropriately self-directed. Furthermore, respect for autonomy grounds common ethical judgments about why people should be allowed to make decisions for themselves. Under this assumption, it is concerning that a number of feminist philosophical conceptions of autonomy present challenges for people with intellectual disability, such that some of these individuals are not recognized as autonomous. This inability to be considered personally autonomous is both intuitively and ethically troubling, as individuals with intellectual disability may have their lives entirely shaped by others. Consequently, they may not have the opportunity to practice and enjoy certain activities that they desire to pursue, such as sex. This paper briefly explores some of the most philosophically influential accounts of autonomy and demonstrates how these accounts fail to address individuals with intellectual disability. As a possible solution to these limited accounts, Laura Davy’s “inclusive design” approach is presented, which is a revised conception of autonomy that specifically accommodates individuals with intellectual disability. Davy’ approach focuses on the claim that support, advocacy, and enablement are required in order for one to live an autonomous life. By maintaining this relational focus, Davy recognizes all individuals as autonomous agents, irrespective of one’s abilities. While Davy’s approach views people with intellectual disability as autonomous, it encounters limitations in regard to sexual autonomy, which incorporates certain judgments that are intuitively at odds with her recommendations. The remainder of this paper depicts three complexities of sexual autonomy and determines why these are problematic for Davy’s account. It seems that perceptions of sex, probable consequences of having sex with an intellectual disability, as well as the challenges of interpreting one’s sexual desires, are

11 significant components which need to be analyzed. After analyzing the complexities of sexual autonomy, it seems that Davy’s approach fails to adequately demonstrate that people with intellectual disability should be viewed as sexually autonomous beings, which has significant implications given the importance of sex.

James W. Boettcher Saint Joseph's University Coercion, Enforcement, Public Justification The concept of coercion has been essential to theories of public reason and public justification. This is most obviously the case in disputes about the scope of public reason, that is, the subject matter or domain where requirements of public reason or principles of public justification are supposed to apply. While the standard view is that these requirements or principles apply to the exercise of coercive political power, there are disagreements about how narrowly or broadly to interpret the relevant range of coercive political activities. Others have challenged the notion that only coercive political activities would be subject to public justification. Disagreements of this sort often reflect different ideas or assumptions about why we should recognize standards of public reason or justification in the first place. Claims about what grounds public reasoning are typically based on the notion that coercing others politically without invoking the appropriate kind of reasons violates some more foundational moral-political norm or principle, e.g., the right to liberty, individual autonomy, or equal respect for persons. Yet in most of the relevant literature the meaning of “coercion” is rarely explicitly articulated. My paper aims to advance these discussions by pursuing several main goals: First, I explain why the so-called “enforcement approach” to the concept of coercion is the best fit for theories of public reason and public justification. Second, I argue that any plausible account of public reason’s scope must presuppose that there is a distinctive kind of harm and disrespect associated with unjustified political coercion. So even if, as several philosophers have recently suggested, the proper subject matter of public justification is not coercion as such but political decision-making, the presumption against coercion must still play an important role in explaining why political decisions must be publicly justified. Finally, I demonstrate that a general presumption against political coercion does not necessarily imply a broad interpretation of public reason’s scope. This presumption is consistent with a more narrow interpretation, where requirements of public reason or principles of public justification would apply only to certain decisions or laws and policies.

Marilea Bramer Minnesota State University Moorhead How to Conceive of Infant Autonomy: The Structure and Uses of Infant Autonomy in a Moral Framework Much of the philosophical literature on autonomy either assumes that children are not yet autonomous or that only older children (age 10 and up) are autonomous. Prevalent attitudes suggest that very young children, including infants and toddlers lack autonomy. Such attitudes

12 are highly problematic because of how they contribute to our view of children, specifically infants and toddlers. We tend to assume children do not have significant commitments and that their goals and projects are unimportant. When it comes to infants and toddlers, we generally think of them as stereotypical representations of their kind, rather than as individuals. I argue here that this is problematic, and suggest that all children, including infants and toddlers, are autonomous individuals deserving of appropriate respect. To demonstrate this, I examine the view that children, including very young children, have autonomy to some degree. I argue that under Amy Mullin’s definition of autonomy, which centers on volitional stability, infants and toddlers do have autonomy. Furthermore, acknowledging this autonomy has direct and important consequences for how parents and caregivers view and treat children, including the obligation to respect them.

Donald W. Bruckner Penn State University, New Kensington Alcoholic Beverages Should be Banned My thesis is that if the usual arguments for greater gun control are good arguments, then parallel arguments for much stricter controls on alcoholic beverages are also good arguments. Consider a first pair of parallel arguments. Argument 1, endorsed by philosophers including David DeGrazia and Hugh LaFollette, goes like this: Firearms cause extensive, preventable harm. In the U.S. in 2011, firearms caused 32,351 deaths. Of these, there were 11,068 homicides, 19,990 suicides, and 591 accidental deaths (Centers for Disease Control). Many of those deaths could have been prevented had firearms been less readily available. So in order to prevent some of those 32,351 deaths, we should enact stricter gun control measures. Argument 2: Alcoholic beverages cause extensive, preventable harm. Between 2006 and 2010, excessive alcohol consumption was responsible for 87,798 deaths in the U.S. each year. Of these, about 7756 were homicides and 8221 were suicides (Centers for Disease Control). About 10,322 were traffic fatalities in which the driver was officially impaired (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Many of these deaths could have been prevented had alcoholic beverages been less readily available. So in order to prevent some of those 87,798 deaths, we should enact stricter alcohol control measures. If Argument 1 justifies stricter gun control measures, then Argument 2 justifies stricter alcohol control measures. If a total ban on guns is justified, then so is a total ban on alcoholic beverages. If just handguns should be banned because they are most likely to be used to kill others, then perhaps just alcohol served in places away from which one has to drive should be banned. If safety courses and universal background checks should be required to purchase guns, then they should be required to purchase alcoholic beverages also. And so on. Perhaps Arguments 1 and 2 are not parallel. One might claim, for example, that death rates, not total deaths, are what matter. In response, I show that the death rate per 100,000 alcohol

13 users is up to 1.6 times the death rate per 100,000 firearm owners. I discuss other claimed disanalogies and argue that either they are not disanalogies or they do not result in justified policy differences. Instead of the consequence-based approach of Arguments 1 and 2, one might try instead for a rights-based argument for gun control. One might argue that greater restrictions on firearms are warranted to prevent people who would do harm with firearms from violating others’ rights to physical security. A parallel argument applies to alcoholic beverages, however, since it violates people’s rights to physical security when they are killed or injured by drunken drivers or raped or killed by drunken rapists or killers. So on a rights-based approach, the warrant for restrictions on alcohol is still as strong as the warrant for restrictions on firearms. In sum, if the usual arguments for stronger gun control succeed, then so do parallel arguments for stronger control of alcoholic beverages.

Larry Busk University of Oregon When is Being a Woman Enough? In an interview toward the end of the latter’s life, Alice Schwarzer asks Simone de Beauvoir if we [feminists] should “evaluate and criticize women [writers] as severely as men,” or if, on the contrary, we should “just be glad that women are writing at all.”• Beauvoir resolutely rejects the second suggestion and endorses the first: “Being a woman is not enough,” she says. Today, discourse concerning diversity and inclusiveness in pedagogy often comes with the caveat of including women authors in reading lists and course design; a syllabus of all men— no matter what the topic—is a problematic syllabus. The arguments for this are numerous and compelling: it serves to reverse the trend of the systematic exclusion of women’s voices from the intellectual world, helps ensure a plurality of epistemic perspectives on a given issue, etc. But is simply “including women” enough? Do we run the risk of lapsing into “tokenism” if we are content to include women in course design for the sake of diversity and inclusion as such? And does it make sense to treat inclusion as a criterion while one might choose to “include” women authors like Ayn Rand or Ann Coulter—i.e., anti-diversity, anti-feminist women? On the other hand, is it possible that such a suspicion of tokenism would allow us to lapse back into a dubious neglect of inclusiveness and thus to exclude women altogether? This paper takes up the question of diversity and inclusiveness with regard to Beauvoir’s remark. It attempts to problematize the notion of inclusion without dismissing it, arguing for a conception that criticizes the tokenist criterion of “including women” without denying the necessity of inclusion. My tentative conclusion is that “being a woman is not enough” because inclusiveness is not (or should not be) about “including women” as such, but about confronting the systematic forms of inequality and relations of domination that have operated in the background of our intellectual discourse and trying to overcome them, which will by

14 necessity involve including women. Being a woman is not enough, but the critique of tokenism is not enough either.

David K. Chan University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point Becoming Just: Law and Virtue in Aristotelian Ethics Is justice another virtue alongside courage, temperance, and other virtues of character examined by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics? There are a number of ways in which justice is different. Aristotle’s attempt to fit justice into the doctrine of the mean is unconvincing. Each vice results from motivation by a particular motive, but there does not seem to be one that applies to every case of injustice. The virtues are exercised by agents who use practical wisdom to determine what to do by taking account of particularities, while justice requires that laws be followed. Justice is complete virtue in the fullest sense, encompassing all the other virtues (EN, V.1). It is also a virtue that requires a political context, and is discussed more fully in Aristotle’s Politics than in his Ethics. In this paper, I shall discuss the role of law in the acquisition of virtues of character. Aristotle stated that the upbringing of the young needs to be regulated by the laws of the state to facilitate the acquisition of good character (EN, X.9). Does this view apply to how citizens acquire the virtue of justice? Does habituation in justice proceed in the same way that it does for other virtues? Given how just outcomes are brought about in the polis through legislation and judicial decisions made by office-holders, how does the non-just individual become motivated to act justly for its own sake? I will first explain how habituation works as a process whereby the young acquire their states of character. Then I will raise some difficulties in applying this model to the acquisition of justice. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss some ways of dealing with the difficulties and make some points regarding justice as a political virtue, and the role of the ideal constitution in Aristotle’s political philosophy.

Lillian Cicerchia Fordham University Political Performativity and Public Speech in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem Following an account of the trial of the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt condemns Eichmann death in a scene of political judgment. In recent work, “Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences,” and “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” Judith Butler has contributed to a new understanding of this passage, which I want to focus on here. Butler’s interpretation of the imaginative scene at the end of EJ illuminates the relationship thinking has to speech in Arendt’s judgment. For Butler, the relationship that thinking has with speech in Arendt’s text involves how speech in thinking constitutes selfhood, and Arendt’s judgment brings the self into the public arena of political judgment. Therefore, when thinking becomes public speech it also becomes a kind of action—a speech-act.

15 I will explore Butler’s claims to clarify what performative speech is for Arendt, and will point out that Butler discloses public speech with a performative dimension in Arendt’s text. “Performative” for Butler means constituting the speaker in the act of speech, in the way that saying "I do" constitutes the married couple. Then, I will contest Butler’s suggestion that for Arendt thinking is a speech-act. Instead, I will argue that Arendt identifies what she considers non-political speech in thought and political speech in action. Consequently, Arendt’s distinctions shed light on how speech can be private and public, non-action and action. My interpretation suggests the importance of performativity to the praxis of freedom in politics: Does moral philosophy and its origins in selfhood ground political action? In this presentation, I will raise Butler’s problem with Arendt’s distinction between two-in-one thought and action to illuminate two different performative moments that, in my view, are involved in one or the other behavior. The two performative moments are (a) self-constitution and (b) the constitution of the political subject. Since Butler focuses on the role of speech-acts in two-in-one thought and in action in terms of how Arendt presents herself at the end of EJ, I will then focus on Arendt’s discussion about self-presentation to show that speech in thought and speech in public are different types of self-presentation. Because Arendt sees selfpresentation as different depending on if one is two-in-one thinking or acting I am lead to argue that Arendt understands speech-acts to be public speech as a form of performative political action. This is contrary to Butler’s view that Arendt implies speech-acts can occur in two-in-one thinking. Instead, Arendt describes two different performative moments in the constitution of the self and the constitution of the political subject.

Anna Cook University of Oregon The Vulnerable Body in Feminist Self-Defense Classes As a former instructor of feminist self-defense classes for women and children, I strongly believe in their potential to transform how women and children feel their bodies to be a source of strength. Feminist self-defense classes reject traditional precautions that instruct women how not to act in public (“don’t walk alone at night, don’t drink or take drugs, don’t wear revealing clothing, etc.).• In contrast to these victim control strategies that reinforce the characterization of the female body as inherently vulnerable and powerless to sexual violation, feminist self-defense classes encourage participants to develop their bodily strength and assertiveness. I worry, however, that this affirmation of bodily strength is one that sustains a narrow definition of corporeal vulnerability as the susceptibility to harm. In this vein, I believe that, in the attempt to challenge the characterization of the female body as inherently vulnerable, feminist self-defense classes often reinscribe a norm of corporeal invulnerability. Recent calls from feminist ethicists to reconceive and reclaim the primacy of corporal vulnerability in both its negative and positive valences invite us to interrogate underlying norms of corporeal invulnerability within the aims and methods of feminist selfdefense classes. Taking into consideration the cultural context that attributes metaphysical vulnerability to the female body, I thus propose to review feminist self-defense classes in light of the feminist criticism of this cultural constant.

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As an initial entry into the larger project of articulating a positive revaluation of vulnerability, I will draw out accounts of metaphysical vulnerability in both traditional rape prevention literature and in feminist self-defense classes. In so doing, I will use resources from feminist phenomenology to describe feminist self-defense classes in their cultural context as a corrective to inhibited bodily comportment that emerges, in part, from internalized messages of precautions to prevent sexual assault. The internalization of these precautions, which are repeated to girls from a young age manifests in the body. Feminist phenomenology can be helpful in identifying the impact of these internalized messages in terms of the creation of female bodily comportment that inscribes and reproduces the metaphysical vulnerability of the female body. The metaphysical vulnerability of the female body is rejected in feminist selfdefense classes in favor of a cultivation of its strength. I will thus examine the conception of the vulnerable body in traditional rape prevention literature and the conception of the strong invulnerable body in feminist self-defense classes, in order to then address the larger question of how feminist self-defense classes can challenge inhibited female bodily comportment in such a way that also disrupts the devaluation of vulnerability.

Barry DeCoster Albany College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences Alliances and Virtue: Beyond Friendships and Collaborations What kind of self is needed to foster alliance building? Collaboration and interdisciplinary work is difficult. For those who are marginalized and/or powerless in various ways, alliance building and collaboration is necessary for survival. These oppressive forces may limit us as individuals, or restrict the values we hold, and how we develop virtuous traits (Tessman 2005). This difficultly is more than a complex puzzle: navigating collaboration requires a certain kind of self, a particular attitude. This paper looks to locate, name, and identify the nature of virtues necessary for such collaborative work and the formation of alliances. As such, alliances are formed across boundaries of power difference, across disciplines, and for complex and different goals. I begin by showing how the alliance-seeker requires a different set of virtues than those of two similar relationships: that of friendships and of collaborations. For Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, friendships involve a flourishing of virtues that derives from equals coming together. Yet this kind of equality is missing in many alliances built within systems of oppression. Collaborations imply a neatly homogenous set of agreed upon goals. Yet many alliances work towards multiple goals, or are initially unclear of the goals for the alliance. Successful alliance building under systems of oppression, as I define it, requires developing both internal and external awareness. Internally, one must be aware of how self-protecting one is: one must be open to new relationships, while protecting one’s self from potential, sometimes likely, harms. Externally, one must be able to “read” potential allies well. This reading the room can go wrong in two ways: If I wrongly expect an ally, then I may enter into a relationship that furthers harm to the self, or fosters ongoing oppressive relationships. If I

17 wrongly expect hostility from a potential ally, then I fail to create new connects, new relationships of change, new realizations of self.

Emmalon Davis Indiana University at Bloomington Types, Tokens, and Brands: Credibility Excess as Epistemic Vice This paper explores the effects of testimonial injustice on underrepresented groups in higher education. This research is propelled by the following two observations. First, a speaker's social identity influences the amount of credibility she is afforded by her epistemic peers, where those with marginalized social identities are likely to receive less credibility than they otherwise would have (Fricker 2007). Second, because verbal exchange between peers is a fundamental component of education, socially marginalized groups may be disproportionately confronted with epistemic barriers in the university setting. For example, women and minorities may find it hard to ‘gain the floor’ during a discussion, they may encounter resistance when advancing novel positions, and they may experience difficulty receiving credit for their contributions. While these experiences are not uncommon, accounts which characterize testimonial injustice solely in terms of credibility deficit do not adequately account for the full range of epistemic harms experienced by speakers with marginalized social identities. Indeed, while Fricker and followers maintain that testimonial injustice is a matter of negative prejudice and credibility deficit, I argue such accounts of testimonial injustice are too narrow. Instead, I explore the role of credibility excess, positive prejudice, and objectification in the lives of marginalized individuals in educational settings. Specifically, I examine the phenomenon of typecasting (de la Luz Reyes and Halcon 1988) in higher education, whereby marginalized individuals are tagged as spokespersons for all issues regarding non-majority constituencies. I argue that typecasting is a pernicious form of credibility excess that is motivated by the identity-prejudicial assumption that all members of non-majority social groups are alike and are thus equally (or interchangeably) suited to speak with authority on behalf of ‘the group.’ This unique form of epistemic injustice places undue epistemic burdens on those already underrepresented in their institutions. On the one hand, targets may feel pressured (or compelled) to become knowledgeable on topics about which they are stereotyped to be credible. On the other hand, assuming the role of educator may impose significant costs on the educator’s time, energy, and ability to advance professionally in a given institution. When the burden to educate dominant members of the community becomes exclusively located within marginalized communities, marginalized knowers are reduced to informational commodities. I argue that such harms are aptly characterized as testimonial injustices. In conclusion, I propose an amendment to Fricker’s virtue of testimonial justice. I suggest that the virtue is more appropriately understood as a mean between two extremes whereby attempts to neutralize bias in one’s credibility assessments must be sensitized not only to prejudicial deficit but to prejudicial excess as well. I argue that feminist pedagogy must be attentive to these subtle forms of epistemic oppression and must seek to actively displace epistemic injustice in educational settings.

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Jill B. Delston University of Missouri, St. Louis Why Virtue Ethicists Parent Poorly: The threat of developmental psychology for childrearing in virtue ethics Virtue ethicists place a large emphasis on action guidance generally and moral education specifically. For that reason, the charge that virtue ethics does not provide comparable action guidance to deontology or utilitarianism is a particularly serious one. In response, virtue ethicists have rightly argued that virtue does provide a great deal of guidance, both in daily life and in childrearing to ensure virtuous adults. However, empirical studies undermine the efficacy of the type of moral advice virtue ethicists provide. Developmental psychologists have uncovered problems with telling children “be nice,” or calling a child “an angel.” Yet virtue ethicists have largely ignored this empirical data so crucial to their standard recommendations. Instead, virtue ethicists consistently recommend character appraisal in moral upbringing, encouraging the use of this language in teaching children. Thus, virtue ethics is—but need not be—committed to a developmentally detrimental form of moral evaluation. I argue that being virtuous and rearing virtuous children calls for the explicit removal of much virtue language and thought. First, I show that virtue ethics permits or requires character appraisal in childrearing. Because achieving virtue takes consistency, habit, reflection, and personal growth, this focus on child-rearing recognizes the role that time plays in becoming good. In fact, the unity of the virtues implies that practical wisdom about one virtue means practical wisdom about childrearing. Next, I look at studies from developmental and clinical psychology showing that character appraisal can be detrimental to children. According to developmental psychologists, character appraisal encourages helpless behavior, quitting, poor self-worth, contingent self-worth, poor coping mechanisms, vicious behavior, misbehavior, guilt, self-blame, and it exacerbates gender differences to the detriment of girls. I then argue that virtue ethics can circumvent this problem by separating the criterion of morality from its pedagogy. The best way to avoid making statements on children’s character traits is to stop thinking about children in this way This shift in thinking, however, means that to foster and facilitate virtue in society we must make conscious efforts to prevent discussion of virtue. Does this shift mark a problem for virtue ethics? In other words, does avoiding virtue to better achieve it pose difficulties for the view? In the last section, I admit that moral schizophrenia may ensue but conclude that moral schizophrenia is not a major problem. In fact, the very emphasis on action guidance and practical advice is what leads virtue ethics out of this objection. Because virtue ethicists aim to offer empirically helpful advice in becoming virtuous, they are uniquely open to the suggestion that practical advice might temporarily contradict the theory. If we argue that denying the value of character in moral education is moral schizophrenia, then we may also be committed to the claim that virtue ethic’s classic dictum— overshoot the mean—is also morally schizophrenic.

Michael D. Doan Acting in the Dark, Together

Eastern Michigan University

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In this paper I engage ongoing conversation concerning responsibility for collective inaction (Held 1970; May 1990; Copp 1991; Tännsjö 2007; Petersson 2008; Isaacs 2011; Young 2011). To anticipate, I am concerned that the main contributions to this conversation leave us ill equipped for the tasks of understanding and working to remedy inaction with respect to especially complex ecological and social problems. It has often been claimed or implied that accounts of collective responsibility developed through the analysis of bystander cases featuring relatively small groups (sometimes referred to in the literature as “coordinated bystander cases”) are also well suited to addressing cases of large-scale collective inaction, including inaction with respect to such complex problems as climate change, environmental degradation, and global and domestic poverty. One of the more striking implications of such a claim is that members of merely “putative” or “loosely structured” groups are under no obligation whatsoever to come together, get organized, and coordinate their actions with a view to preventing or reducing harms—at least, that is, until a collective action solution somehow “comes into focus” and becomes “clear to the reasonable person” (Held 1970; Isaacs 2011). I contend that these claims are seriously misleading and that an alternative account of responsibility for collective inaction is needed—one better suited to addressing the long-neglected epistemic dimensions of collective inaction. I proceed as follows. In Section One I begin by offering an overview of recent conversation concerning responsibility for collective inaction. In Section Two I then go on to identify various commonalities in the approaches adopted by the main contributors, which inform the central conclusions drawn thus far and continue to shape the character and scope of conversation. I discuss several drawbacks of this shared approach before focusing on a particularly worrisome point of convergence. Finally, in Section Three I consider how José Medina’s work on the concept of “epistemic friction” might be helpful in elaborating an alternative approach. I argue that future conversations concerning collective inaction would benefit from a lot less hoping for sudden bursts of clarity, and far more sustained, everyday engagement with truly transformative sources of friction.

Kayleigh A. Doherty Arizona State University Can Anderson’s Imperative of Integration Accommodate Native American’s Right to SelfDetermination? In her book The Imperative of Integration, Elizabeth Anderson argues that in order to achieve racial justice we must first focus on integrating our lives at every level of society (interpersonal, social, and legal/formal). However, integration can pose a challenge to Native Americans’ legal right to self-determination. In this paper, I argue that the integrative model of inclusion that Anderson proposes is compatible with self-determination but it must look and work differently for Native groups than other racial minorities. There are various interpretations of what “self-determination” refers to from full political sovereignty to more ambiguous language such as “the right to control one’s cultural destiny.” Article 1 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR) states, “All peoples have the right

20 to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.”• Within the United States, Native Americans’ right to self-determination has been recognized through the granting of reservations, which keeps Native populations segregated from the dominant society. As a result, the dominant society has very little knowledge of Native culture and practices and the maintenance of negative stereotypes and implicit biases that deem Native peoples as “lazy,” “uneducated,” and “primitive” • persist. As a result, Native peoples suffer from what Miranda Fricker terms testimonial injustice in interacting with people in the dominant society, which further contributes to the marginalization of Native populations. If we take Anderson’s model of integration at face value, it would appear to call for Native populations to be integrated into the dominant society through the elimination of reservations. Reservations maintain social, spatial, and epistemic segregation in that it restricts people from the dominant society from entering and participating in life on the reservations. However, the elimination of reservations would threaten Native groups’ right to self-determination in that their land rights would be threatened, which, in turn, threatens cultural and religious rights. So, how might we integrate Native populations without dissolving reservations and maintaining Native peoples’ right to self-determination? In attempting to answer this challenge I examine four models for self-determination: sovereignty, self-management, co-management, and participation, and propose a new integrative model of inclusion which combines the sovereignty and participation models. In doing so, Native peoples’ maintain their land, cultural, and religious rights, as well as open the door to genuine epistemic interaction with the dominant culture. In doing so, the hope is that the new integrative model has the ability to combat epistemic injustice and maintain Native Americans’ right to self-determination—a right that is essential to maintaining their culture on a whole.

Jenn Dum Honnethian Critical Education

Binghamton University

In this paper, I argue against Krassimit Stojanov’s claim that respect as Honneth defines it does not apply to the context of children’s education. According to Stojanov, respect for Honneth is a form of recognition between morally mature persons in the legal sphere. So, Honneth’s notion of respect does not apply to interactions between adults and children in educational settings. Pedagogical respect is a caring attitude toward the interests of morally immature persons so that such persons can learn to express their own needs, intentions, and views to other people. But respect in Honneth’s terms is solely important in education because it prevents teachers from discriminating against children. Furthermore, Honneth’s notion of respect necessarily excludes disabled children from the scope of recognition because they lack the potential to be morally autonomous.

21 Stojanov is wrong for three reasons. First, it is a form of disrespect if children are treated in a way that impedes their flourishing. In his recent book Freedom’s Right, Honneth stresses the importance of children being treated as individual persons with their own interests. This captures the core desideratum of the kind of educational respect that Stojanov defends and it is a kind of treatment that can be legally required of teachers through the right kinds of training and curriculum requirements. Second, the law does more than prevent discrimination in school. It regulates things like educational resources, curriculum standards, extra-curricular opportunities, and faculty-student ratios. If there were inequalities between schools in regards to these things, this would be a form of legal disrespect against the children in those disadvantaged schools. Third, it is consistent with Honneth’s theory that disabled children have the same educational rights as non-disabled students. They are still persons with a unique set of interests that teachers have an obligation to recognize. If a disability interferes with the child’s flourishing, this is bad luck. But this does not exclude the child from the sphere of recognition in educational settings. These arguments against Stojanov help to clarify how Honneth’s theory of recognition can provide normative grounding for a critical theory of education. Rauno Huttunen and Mark Murphy have argued that Honneth’s theory can provide normative grounding for education that aims to overcome the negative effects of social injustices on individual flourishing. They focus on emancipatory adult education that motivates adults to understand and overcome oppression. It should be clarified, though, that education can prevent the oppression of children in the first place. Education itself works against the negative effects of oppression because being educated has a strong influence on the development of self-esteem, selfconfidence, and self-respect. According to Honneth, every person is equally entitled to develop these relations-to-self and to have the conditions in place needed for such development. So, it is unjust if students’ self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence are harmed by educational policies, lack of education, or inequalities in educational resources across schools.

Barrett Emerick Love and Resistance

St. Mary's College of Maryland

In this paper I will argue that love has at least three important implications for those who are concerned with promoting social justice. The first is ontological. Marilyn Friedman and Robert Nozick defend what has come to be known as the union/federation account of love. They claim that love changes the topography of the self. It expands one’s boundaries to include others to create a new entity, not replacing existing individuals, but creating a new, additional combined identity. You share in the fate of the one you love; when things go well or badly for the other there is a meaningful sense in which they also go well or badly for you. I will argue that love creates or promotes the opportunity for deep investment, which is crucial to the promotion of justice. Loving another

22 who is differently socially located means that you are affected by the unjust structures and institutions that harm them in a way that you wouldn’t be otherwise. That fact gives rise to the second implication, which is perceptual. We are importantly limited by various cognitive biases that are tied to our social location. Because we suffer from ingroup favoritism, for example, we are more likely to recognize the merits or achievements of others who are similarly socially located. Furthermore, because we suffer from system justification bias, we are disinclined to perceive injustice—especially “civilized” oppression— when faced with it. I will argue that love can help increase our perceptual abilities in light of those biases so that we are more likely to recognize instances of injustice, both big and small, when we encounter them. The third implication that love has for the promotion of social justice is within the contexts of loving relationships where one party bears racist, sexist, homophobic, or other prejudicial attitudes, beliefs, or emotions. Those who are concerned with promoting social justice often hope for a “magic” argument—one that will instantly cause our prejudiced interlocutor to come to see the world differently. In my experience, such arguments rarely exist. Instead, what we can do is actively choose to stay in those relationships that are painful and costly for the would-be agent of liberation, in order to help the prejudiced party to give up her problematic mental states in a more realistic fashion—sometimes painfully slowly, often over the course of years or a lifetime—and often via baby steps. In other words, we should follow James Baldwin’s advice to his nephew when he says: “We, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” Love is a vital tool in the agent of liberation’s toolkit. It serves to change us, change our perception of injustice, and thereby enable others to change as well.

Shane Epting University of North Texas Measuring the Moral Dimensions of Infrastructure Urban planners relying on moral theory when implementing sustainable infrastructure do not always secure moral outcomes. How do moral systems fail in such instances? Is there a need for another theory? No. Rather, a supplemental measure that is compatible with existing positions and planning goals such as sustainability or resiliency should suffice. This measure would identify infrastructure’s moral aspects and gauge its effects. Pinpointing these features gives planners a way to determine which public facilities will benefit population centers. Such results demand that we examine numerous dimensions of sustainable urbanization. For instance, some studies show that implementing sustainable infrastructure can directly harm marginalized groups, but such injuries represent only a fraction of possible damages. From building materials to the distribution of services, taking inventory of how infrastructure affects humanity reveals the depth of its moral significance. Yet, current conceptions of moral theory cause problems for making comprehensive assessments of public artifacts and services

23 such as transportation infrastructure. Morality is a concept often reserved for assessing human action, not the objects that humans use. To overcome the limits of moral theory in such cases, discussing the morality of infrastructure must go beyond seeing the planner as culpable agent. One must look beyond blame, which requires thinking about public facilities while being mindful of community flourishing and sustainable living. I am not saying that planners have immunity, but a method for examining infrastructure’s far-reaching impacts will advance our understanding about the moral significance of public facilities and services. Debates about artifacts’ agency from philosophy of technology benefit these needed investigations. For instance, many philosophers of technology agree that artifacts have a kind of agency. Emerging positions, however, offer reasons to abandon such claims, providing an alternative that does not challenge established views in mainstream philosophy. For instance, Phillip Brey’s criticisms about the range of options within the agency-of-artifacts literature are solid, maintaining that it is important to keep human accountability firmly in view. He puts forth an alternative explanation that touches on moral outcomes, but his view requires fleshing out to see the wealth of knowledge regarding the moral dimensions of infrastructure. Accordingly, in this paper, I discuss the limits of moral theory in planning, reveal ways to morally categorize infrastructure, and illustrate how planners can achieve moral outcomes through complementing theory with a supplemental measure. Lastly, I reveal how questioning morality in urban planning advances moral theory, proposing a future meta-ethical research area.

Saba Fatima Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Being Brown in Academia and Epistemic Insecurity I am an international faculty at a small teaching institute. The designation is odd in itself, because I have been an American citizen for quite a while before taking this job, however, the description has been deemed to fit me best in terms of how others may define my ‘contribution to diversity.’ As a perpetual outsider, in virtue of my body, accent, and mannerisms, I have encountered, what is termed as, microaggressions both within the classroom and in context of presenting my research. As a woman of color, I am continually aware of the small percentage of non-whites within philosophy in particular, and how this impacts women of color’s ability to speak about their experiences with an expectation of understanding such encounters by their White counterparts. In this paper, I elaborate on the epistemic harm experienced by young women of color in not having their lived reality validated by colleagues and the academia at-large. Yolanda Flores Niemann, in her work in Presumed Incompetent, writes about stereotype threat, identity integration and tribulations that women of color undergo. Here, I focus on Niemann’s exploration of identity integration. I develop on the experience of a sense of paranoia that can be difficult to confirm and or escape for young academics of color. I incorporate the work of Miranda Fricker’s in Epistemic Injustice on how credibility appraisals sustain structural epistemic injustices. I, then elaborate on the impact of the harm on women of color with José Medina’s call for analyzing this harm within a sociohistorical analysis that ‘contextualizes and connects sustained chains of interactions’

24 (Epistemology of Resistance, 60). The paper is an examination of the burden of the epistemic doubt that women of color carry in academia within the sociohistorical context of the discipline of philosophy.

Jacob Fay Harvard Graduate School of Education Reflecting on Rocky Choices: Justice, School Discipline, and Classroom Membership In this essay, I address educational justice in relationship to classroom discipline. The decision to remove a disruptive child from class is often supported by traditional views of desert or utilitarianism. In instances of classroom disruption, a desert view holds that a student is removed from class as a logical response to a particular behavior while a utilitarian view values the interests of the class against interests of a single student. Here, I challenge both of these views though an account of classroom membership, and propose an alternative normative framework for classroom discipline. To develop this account, I draw on an example of actual classroom practice in which a teacher, Ms. Brown, faces a potential outburst during a rock classification activity from a girl in her third-grade class, Kate. Kate struggles with an undefined emotional-behavioral disorder severe enough that she was placed in an emotional support classroom for most of her second-grade year. She has returned to Ms. Brown’s mainstreamed classroom largely because of Ms. Brown’s advocacy and her own desire to do so. However, during this particular activity, Kate’s two partners become engaged in a spirited debate about one rock, and though their debate exemplifies some of Ms. Brown’s learning goals for the activity, it has also isolated and upset Kate. As Kate edges closer to an outburst, Ms. Brown must make a decision to either remove Kate from class or alter the classroom dynamics in a way that allows Kate to remain in the class. Using insights from this example, I argue that classroom discipline turns on an account of membership, which I suggest is a social good that is both constructed and contingent in nature, and that some students may experience as fragile. Contra desert views, this account suggests that a student’s behavior is a product of both individual decisions and the actions of others in the classroom. As the example helps demonstrate, actions that we typically favor may actually contribute to a student exhibiting disruptive behavior. Thus, a calculation of desert may unfairly weight disruptive behavior and ignore other important factors. Contra utilitarian views, the notion of membership suggests that the interests of the class and the interests of particular students may be difficult to disentangle or even aligned in many instances. Thus, the distinction between interests appears an incomplete means to address disruptive behavior in school. The membership account thus favors inclusive solutions to classroom disruptions over exclusive solutions. It finds fault with both desert and utilitarian solutions to Ms. Brown’s dilemma, as both tend to unjustifiably exclude students from the important good of membership. Finally, the membership account explains how teachers’ decisions can undermine and reinforce students’ statuses in the classroom, underscoring the extraordinary reach of teachers’ power to define the classroom social environment.

Norman Arthur Fischer

Kent State University

25 A Left Libertarian Philosophy of democracy How much libertarianism is necessary for liberal democracy? Liberalism depends on rational limits for the state. and thus must utilize some libertarianism, which makes limits to the stare one of its prime objectives. Left democracy must balance its endorsement of a strong economic justice element in the state with a defense of the classical civil liberties of free speech and due process that must share much with libertarian positions, including some on the right. Left libertarianism will be regarded by many on the left as extreme in its defense of civil liberties, just as the vast majority of right libertarians will regard it as extreme in its willingness to have the state mandate economic justice. Thus, left libertarians are regarded as extreme by many leftists and by many right libertarians. Both sides are right that left libertarianism is not a middle of the road position. My left libertarian democratic philosophy comes out of a probing of the nature of antiliberalism, particularly democratic antiliberalism. In his Anatomy of Antiilberalism, and passions and Constraint, Stephen Holmes has drawn a portrait of antiliberalism that makes particularly clear that antiliberalism can easily take democratic forms. Left libertarianism arises out of a search to avoid both democratic and antiddemocratic antiliberalism, and also to achieve left economic aims that right libertarians refuse to endorse. I am inspired by Holmes’ analysis to characterize anitliberal democracy in terms of what I term its proteanism and particularism. There are some democratic theorists who focus on the ethical value of simply having a sense of identity within community, and who often emphasize, more than standard liberals, that a healthy expression of community identity will stress both the varied and protean nature of the activity of the community, and their unique particularity. although this is my terminology I think Holmes would agree with me that these tendencies underlie much democratic antiliberalism, and that they can improperly injure individual liberty. Proteanism can be harmful to individual liberty because it may put no or inadequate limits on the kinds of things society can demand of the individual. Particularism can harm individual liberty because in the interest of communal identity it may demand too much conformity to any given social order, even an irrational one, rather than to more universal rational norms. In short, democratic proteanism can foster treating the individual with arbitrariness, and democratic particularism can foster smothering of the individual in tribalism. But Holmes goes further than me. For Holmes, I believe, would substitute a ‘must’ for my ‘can.’ For Holmes this protean and particularistic democracy is therefore incompatible with a liberal theory of limits to society's mandates. (Anatomy, 1, 9,157, 176) Contra Holmes, I shall argue that a certain type of democratic proteanism and particuarism can properly limit mandation. Specifically, left libertarianism emphasizes that (one) the classical civil liberties of freedom of speech and due process and (two) state intervention into economic justice as a vital need in American society today can properly limit mandates.

Julian Roel Gonzalez University of Kansas Scanlon’s Misguidance in Rawls’ Reflective Equilibrium T. M. Scanlon describes John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium in the “descriptive” and “deliberative” interpretations. By explaining the criticisms of conservatism and relativism and

26 Scanlon’s responses a foundation to criticize these interpretations can be built. I suspect that Scanlon has overlooked the limits of reflective equilibrium, to which Rawls himself admits exist, and discounts the relativistic nature by providing an inherently relativistic solution. The use of cultural moral work by psychological anthropologist Richard Shweder via Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind will assist in showing possible failures in Scanlon’s response. In the end it is evident that Scanlon misunderstands the reflective equilibrium process that Rawls has in mind given the lack of agreement with what Rawls is presenting. The solutions provided by Scanlon merely dismiss and hardly regard the objections against reflective equilibrium as legitimate, a flaw as this is not the sort of reflective equilibrium that Rawls argues within a Theory of Justice. In Scanlon’s first response to the allegation of conservatism, there is no real regard to the fact that an individual could stop at the first instance of reflective equilibrium to find considered judgments to fit already decided principles and beliefs. This is incorrect. The second response to the charge of relativism is that more reflective equilibrium is needed to solve incompatible results. This too is erroneous. This presentation is made in four distinct sections: First a definition of reflective equilibrium, followed second by a presentation of the two interpretations of reflective equilibrium. Third I present objections to reflective equilibrium and failed responses of Scanlon, and finally the summation that Scanlon is mistaken about Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium is a process that is concerned with the individual’s own process, and Scanlon actually fails to solve the relativistic charge by insisting that a relativistic solution is needed. An individual needs to look at his or her own process and see where the incompatible result occurred. This response fails to realize that incompatible principles do exist, but that individuals or groups in such cases will never have to sustain them in the same instance since most likely the groups would be separate.

Anna Gotlib Brooklyn College CUNY A Voice of One's Own: Reflective Teaching, Bioethics, and the Underprivileged Student Teaching is neither a morally nor a politically neutral practice. The contexts in which one teaches are diverse interactions of place, power, and culture. This is especially the case when one’s students are underprivileged, the first in their family to attend college, belong to groups affected by socioeconomic, political, and other hardships--and when the subject matter happens to be bioethics. I suggest that the teaching of bioethics to these students presents a special pedagogical challenge not only because bioethical inquiry raises specific morally, emotionally, and politically-charged issues, but also because it often implicates unspoken narratives of power, justice, and inclusivity. I argue for a reflective practice of teaching bioethics that recognizes, and acts upon, the deeply-embedded norms and cultural exclusivities of the discipline. Specifically, reflective teaching responds to those disempowering practices and master narratives that discourage the underprivileged not only from participating, but also from imagining themselves as capable of engagement. To this end, I will first argue that one’s pedagogy must move beyond traditional concepts and claims, challenging presuppositions about who “belongs” in the discourse. Second, I will suggest that in creating these inclusive moral spaces, instructors should turn not only to multi-perspectival

27 and non-juridical narratives and cases, but to methodologies that allow the students to regard biomedical discourse as properly their own, both epistemically and morally. Third, I will claim that through the two practices noted above, not only will the instructor engage directly with the ongoing epistemic injustices within the academy more generally, but specifically, she will do so in ways that radically challenge the implicit and explicit power structures and politics of the bioethics classroom itself. By thus acknowledging, and acting on, the sociopolitical realities of bioethical pedagogy, reflective teaching can begin to re-align the balance of sociocultural power such that underprivileged students can participate in creating the vital discursive spaces that cultivate their own moral agency within and without the discipline. What emerges is a student who may view bioethics as a vital intellectual enterprise, but more importantly, who conceives of herself as a capable, valued participant in this, and in other, discourses.

Carol C. Gould Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York Can Empathy and Solidarity with Distant Others be Taught? Theorists of transnational politics have analyzed the requirements of global justice, e.g., in terms of alleviating extreme poverty, considering the differential impacts of climate change, or fulfilling the human rights not only of co-nationals but of people across the globe. But in practice, these well-founded normative requirements come up against a well-known difficulty: While people tend to concern themselves with the well-being of family, friends, and others close to them, perhaps extending to their own national group, they may not show much concern for the salient needs and rights of distant others. This raises the question of the motivation that people have, or could come to have, to care about and help distant people. Where this question has been considered, emphasis is often placed on rationally reflecting on people’s equality worldwide. Yet, the simple recognition of people’s equality, as a moral status, may be insufficient to motivate the requisite feelings of solidarity and concern, and a fortiori, the actions required to address the alleviation of global poverty and exploitation, or adaptation to climate change. This paper begins by focusing on a missing element in these analyses, namely, the role that can be played by empathy in motivating people to take seriously the effects of politics and policies on distant people, and the ways that empathy can help generate action in solidarity with them. Empathy can be seen to have not only a motivational but also an epistemic role in this context. It can be analyzed (drawing on Darwall, as well as feminist ethicists) as involving a cognitive understanding of the perspective of others in their particular situation, along with some degree of “feeling with” them. Empathy can thus supplement reasoning by providing motivation to take seriously norms like human rights and can help in applying reasoning processes to diverse situations. The potential dangers with empathy also need to be considered, e.g., a too easy identification with the other, with an attendant reinforcement of privilege, and the insufficiency of empathy without awareness of differential power positions.

28 The paper will go on to address whether such forms of cosmopolitan empathy and solidarity across borders can in fact be taught, and if they can, what is involved in the required new forms of cosmopolitan education. It will review the relatively scant literature on education for empathy and on cultivating dispositions to cross-border solidarity. While some attention has been given to inclusive forms of primary education within liberal democracies, e.g., in appreciating US citizens’ status as hyphenated Americans with diverse customs and holidays, little attention has been paid to extending these forms of inclusiveness across borders. And although there has been theorizing concerning how to teach critical thinking, less attention has been given to education in empathy and the sentiments more broadly. Exceptions include Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1996) or Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child By Child (2005). But philosophical analysis of teaching empathy is lacking (unlike the persistent investigation into whether virtue can be taught). A related question concerns how to cultivate a link between reasoning and empathy, especially in regard to recognizing the rights, and feeling for the needs, of distant others. The paper will conclude with a few concrete suggestions for addressing these core concerns for cosmopolitan education.

Tammy Harel Ben-Shahar Columbia University Law School Equality in Education: Why We Must Go all the Way Amidst the lively philosophical debate regarding distributive justice in education, there is a position that has not yet been seriously defended, a position I call ‘all-the-way-equality’, according to which justice in education requires equality in educational outcome between all individual students. Not merely between equally able children, or between different social groups and classes—but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, ability, and the degree of effort they invested. In this paper I attempt to do just that: argue that when it comes to equality in education, nothing short of “going all the way” will do. All-the-way-equality may seem, at first glance, much too radical an approach to be plausible, or to be relevant to real life education policy. It seems simply impossible to achieve equal educational outcome for all children, and the mere attempt is bound to lead to undesirable consequences, primarily lowering the achievement of certain children in order to obtain equality. This explains why the principle hasn’t received appropriate attention from philosophers, who have, instead, argued for less demanding principles of justice, such as meritocracy, adequacy, and lately, priority for the worst-off. I aim to show that this initial reaction to all-the-way-equality is mistaken and that while very demanding, it is a plausible principle of justice in education. In fact, I contend that it does a better job realizing the goals of distributive justice in education than other principles of justice. The starting point of the argument is the widely endorsed meritocratic principle of justice in education, that allows for inequality based on differences in ability and effort, but not inequality caused by other factors such as family background, race or sex. In order to establish all-the-way-equality, I rule out inequality based on both ability and effort, concluding that

29 equality in education requires, at least prima facie, equalizing educational outcome between all individual children. After presenting the argument for all-the-way-equality, I move on to address the various objections to this principle, the most pressing of which are related to the negative consequences that realizing it may bring about. Much like other theories of educational justice, all-the-way-equality is a pluralistic approach, therefore there will be cases when, all things considered, the initial requirements of justice must withdraw in order to realize competing values. Balancing all-the-way-equality with competing values mitigates some of the principle’s most undesirable consequences while maintaining much of its initial thrust, making it both a plausible theory of justice in education, and an attractive one.

Celeste Harvey Marquette University, Milwaukee WI The Sticky Question of Human Nature: stumbling-block or resource for Aristotelian Feminist Eudaimonism? This paper is one part of a larger project to develop a feminist, eudaimonist moral philosophy. A number of feminists have recently turned to the moral resources of Aristotelian eudaimonism to articulate the moral harms of oppression. However, making the moral philosophy developed by Aristotle compatible with a feminist moral perspective presents a number of challenges, since Aristotle’s moral perspective is not suitable for feminist use in its unfiltered state. Lisa Tessman (2005) offers one of the most sustained feminist engagements with Aristotelian eudaimonism, and she has gone quite some way in revising Aristotle’s starting assumptions in order to make the eudaimonism he articulates feminist-compatible. The revisions she makes to Aristotle’s eudaimonism allow her to disclose a set of character traits that, despite being praiseworthy from the perspective of resisting oppression, create obstacles to their bearer’s capacity to flourish. She calls such traits “burdened virtues.” Amongst the many essential revisions to Aristotle’s eudaimonism that Tessman makes, she avoids taking a stand either for or against the methodological role Aristotle assigned to human nature in reasoning about flourishing. I argue that Tessman’s own attempt to avoid the “sticky” question of human nature is not successful, and that defending the “burdened virtues” as “virtues” requires a robust, normative conception of human nature. The reasons why suggest that any eudaimonist moral philosophy will need a substantive conception of human nature in order to defend its own normative conception of flourishing. Feminists will obviously not be able to endorse the substance of Aristotle’s views on human nature, but articulating their own substantive account of human nature will be a central task in developing a feminist eudaimonism. In respect to the methodological role of human nature in a eudaimonist moral theory, Tessman (and feminist generally) should follow Aristotle as opposed to breaking with him.

Peter W. Higgins

Eastern Michigan University

30 Three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men: teaching Marilyn Frye's "Oppression" Marilyn Frye’s 1983 essay “Oppression” is required reading in most introductory feminist philosophy and women’s studies courses. I assign Frye’s essay in each section of Feminist Theory (a lower-level, general education course) I teach. Frye’s essay is controversial for its claim that, despite the limitations masculinity sometimes imposes on men (such as not being able to cry in public), men are not oppressed as men. Many of my students are persuaded by Frye’s arguments, but a large percentage demonstrate hostility to her conclusion. They argue that the masculine gender role imposes a variety of oppressive burdens on men and cite myriad examples in support of their view: men must pay on dates; men are expected to be breadwinners for their families; men have more limited fashion options and may not wear make-up; men are more likely than women (overall) to be victims of violence; men can be drafted for war. (Some recent philosophical work—e.g., David Benatar’s The Second Sexism (2012)—defends this sort of view as well.) Frye’s essay argues powerfully against the hypothesis that men are oppressed as men, but offers no alternative explanations to account for the various costs masculinity imposes on men. I believe the absence of such alternative hypotheses may explain, in part, student resistance to Frye’s view. In this essay, I will argue that the data in question (the examples of limitations and harms masculinity imposes on men) is best explained by the following three mutually-compatible hypotheses. 1. Compulsory heterosexuality. Examples involving men being ridiculed, harassed, or threatened for engaging in behaviors culturally categorized as feminine are not penalties for being a man; they are penalties for being (or seeming) gay, as gayness is stereotyped in contemporary American society. The hypothesis that such penalties are evidence of men’s oppression has the effect of directing concern for social justice away from an actuallyoppressed groups, viz., sexual minorities. 2. The enforcement of male privilege. Men who defy the expectations of masculinity are living counterexamples to the belief that traditional gender roles, the cornerstone of male privilege, are natural (i.e., biologically determined). If traditional gender roles are “natural,” then the social advantages men accrue from them are inevitable and, thus, cannot be challenged as unjust. The maintenance of male privilege therefore requires that counterexamples to the naturalness of traditional gender roles be eliminated. Thus, while some men are indeed harmed by masculinity, its enforcement tends to benefit men as a group. So understood, examples of harms masculinity imposes on men are, in fact, evidence of women’s oppression. 3. Collateral damage. Masculinity requires that men be aggressive, quick to violence, emotionally restrained (except with respect to anger), and “protective” toward women. Compliance with these expectations indeed sets men up for many harms, including

31 vulnerability to violence, but these harms are best understood as a kind of collateral damage: unintended but unavoidable by-products of the very undertaking in virtue of which men are able to gain the benefits of social cooperation to a greater extent than women.

Zach Hoskins University of Nottingham Invisible Punishment? Legal practice traditionally has drawn a distinction between the "direct" and "collateral" consequences of a criminal conviction. The direct consequences consist of the formal sentence handed down by a judge: incarceration, community service, monetary penalty, etc. Other legal measures, such as restrictions on employment, public housing, voting, and so on typically have been treated as civil measures rather than as part of an offender’s criminal punishment. These restrictions are not found in rules governing sentencing options and are not handed down by the sentencing judge to individual offenders; instead, they are scattered throughout federal, state, or local laws, apply to entire classes of offenders, and typically take effect automatically on conviction. In recent years, however, a growing number of scholars have contended that these restrictions constitute additional forms of punishment. Jeremy Travis termed them "invisible punishment" to underscore that although they are not part of the formal sentencing process and have not traditionally figured prominently in debates about sentencing policies, they are punishment nonetheless. U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens echoed this sentiment, writing, "In my opinion, a sanction that (1) is imposed on everyone who commits a criminal offense, (2) is not imposed on anyone else, and (3) severely impairs a person’s liberty is punishment." How we think of collateral restrictions--as civil measures or as forms of criminal punishment-matters. It matters from a practical perspective, as a number of legal constraints and protections attach to criminal punishment that do not attach to civil measures. It also matters at a more basic level of justification: Because punishment and civil measures raise distinct normative challenges, some restrictions may be justifiable as civil measures that are not justifiable as punishment, and vice versa. I am sympathetic to the critical view that traditional legal practice’s general distinction between punishment and collateral restrictions is unjustified. In my view, however, many of the critics of this distinction have been too quick to accept that essentially any burdensome legal restriction triggered by a criminal conviction should be treated as punishment. In what follows, I flesh out and critically assess two general approaches to thinking about how to treat collateral restrictions: an approach that appeals to the practical consequences of treating them one way or another; and an approach that looks to the functions of punishment and asks whether the various restrictions are punitive in their function. I argue that we should opt for the second approach. If we do, we’ll find that traditional legal practice’s blanket treatment of

32 these restrictions as civil measures is untenable, but we’ll equally find problematic the view that all burdensome legal consequences of a criminal conviction constitute punishment. Instead, if we focus on the distinctive features of criminal punishment itself, and the other sorts of roles that state coercion might play outside the scope of criminal sanctions, then we should expect that whether restrictive legal measures constitute punishment will depend on the particular measure and the particular circumstance in which it’s imposed.

Paul McLaughlin University of Limerick Towards a Critical-Analytic Philosophy of Education Two of the established traditions within contemporary philosophy of education are analytic philosophy of education (which is generally associated with the work of C.D. Hardie, Israel Scheffler, R.S. Peters, and others) and critical pedagogy (which is generally associated with the work of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and others). These traditions are often held to be opposed in two basic respects: the philosophical respect (where they arguably track the Analytic/ Continental division in contemporary philosophy as a whole); and the political respect (where they arguably track the Conservative / Radical division in modern political thought as a whole). Accordingly, analytic philosophy of education--a tradition positively characterized by its intellectual discipline--is often criticized for being apolitical or even reactionary, while critical pedagogy--a tradition positively characterized by its sociopolitical consciousness--is often criticized for being unclear or even meaningless. It is worth noting, however, that the respective criticisms differ in (political or philosophical) kind and that the resulting dispute is somewhat divergent. In this paper, a dehistoricized conception of both analytic philosophy of education and critical pedagogy is developed in order to disclose a particular philosophical procedure (broadly consistent with that of Peters as a matter of historical fact), on the one hand, and political disposition (broadly consistent with that of Freire as a matter of historical fact), on the other. There is, it is argued, no incompatibility between the disclosed procedure and disposition. Indeed, the procedure in question may lend intellectual support to the disposition in question; while the disposition may lend sociopolitical impetus to the procedure. A synthesis of analytic philosophy of education and critical pedagogy--both understood in the relevant dehistoricized manner--may yield what educationalists concerned with matters of social justice ultimately require: a rigorous yet radical philosophy of education. Such a philosophy simultaneously satisfies the demands of analyticity and those of criticality.

Michael S. Merry University of Amsterdam Education and the Imaginary Public Each year in the UK and elsewhere there are passionate defences offered for state-public schools--often pitted against private schools or state academies--criticising any and all perceived threats to what is "public" about them. The tone of the debate in the English

33 context is typically one with unmistakable social class inflections; as part of the defence of the state-public (comprehensive) school one hears perennial calls for abolishing (elite) private schools, imposing a moratorium on the expansion of academies, and further, substantially curtailing what the Independent sector is able to do. While there is a great deal of overlap in the North American context, the tone of the debate differs somewhat. There the defence of state-public schools is pitted not against privates but against public charters and voucher schemes, both of which are frequently accused of taking resources away from ordinary statepublic schools. There is also, in the American context, a presumed context of class differentials, but always coloured by consideration of race and ethnicity. Alternatives to traditional public schools--which are often referred to as non-public--are represented as further disadvantaging the already disadvantaged. Denunciations of public charters and voucher systems are often accompanied by calls to invest more money in state-public schools, and give unstinting support to "public school" teachers. We do not gainsay the inequities that may be found between many state-publics and their alternatives (even if the facts often point in the opposite direction). We, too, believe that education has, and should maintain, a public character and mission. Indeed, we join others who defend education as public in the best sense of the word: free and available to all at the point of entry, an adequately challenging pedagogy and curriculum capable of appealing to the intrinsic motivation to learn in all children, and finally, entailing knowledge and skills necessary for taking up meaningful vocational pursuits, but also modes of interaction that prepare young people to engage with differing points of view, critically reflect upon those (often incommensurate) ideas, and acquire the capacities necessary to engage with others as fellow citizens. But in addressing the glaringly evident problems with state-public education from within this "idealistic" view, rejecting all manner of reform as a threat to "the public", liberal defenders of the public school create what seems to us an inescapable conundrum. That is because public schools as they currently exist in the UK and US are manifestly particularistic, non-inclusive, coercive, and unequal. This should not be surprising to the liberal professoriate. The history and theory of the systemic injustices of public schooling is what the professoriate routinely and unapologetically teach its students about the history and theory of schooling, exactly as neoliberal commentators say they do. But if that is the case, then is the defence of "the statepublic school" just misguided nostalgia for a state of grace that never was, or a utopian fantasy in which capitalism really doesn't produce intractable disparities of wealth, power, and opportunity?

co-presenters Ramona Ilea Pacific University Oregon Monica Janzen Anoka-Ramsey Community College Cultivating Citizenship: Student-Initiated Civic Engagement Projects

34 We (Ramona Ilea and Monica Janzen) aim to share our extensive work on implementing, disseminating, and assessing civic engagement projects in philosophy classes. We have used the projects in a variety of philosophy classes and with diverse student populations and learning environments, such as those found at two-year technical colleges and liberal arts colleges. These projects have the common themes of encouraging activism, leadership, responsibility, and outreach. A primary goal of these assignments is to empower students to learn ways in which to work toward social change, and, ultimately, become more skilled citizens. To do this, students identify an issue they feel passionate about and then design and implement a project that addresses this issue. Students’ agency in the choice of work and the requirement to engage with the public differentiate these projects from some common forms of service learning and also help facilitate the goal of becoming more engaged citizens in their wider communities. We will discuss specific strategies to implement civic engagement projects in philosophy classes. We will also share the tools found on our website, ww.engagedphilosophy.com: assignment guidelines, sample projects, and testimonials and data supporting civic engagement results. These materials help solve practical problems in implementation and sharing of results by providing concrete resources. The website helps archive projects to record processes and display end products. We will demonstrate how the website helps philosophy faculty and students organize, participate in, share, and study the results of community-based projects conducted in philosophy classes. Finally, we will share the results of quantitative and qualitative evaluations conducted in Fall 2013 and Fall 2014. This assessment evaluates the results of various courses at three different institutions. We gauge students’ confidence in their own philosophical and practical skills, along with their evaluations of the success and impact of their projects. Our results show students improvement in three areas: (1) Philosophical skills, such as ability to reflect critically on their own and others’ actions and ideas, argumentation skills, and ability to engage in civil dialogue; (2) Capacities for agency and positive attitude, such as motivation to create change, ability to see themselves as capable of creating change, and empathy with “different” others; and (3) Practical skills, such as problem solving and time management.

Kyle Johannsen Queen's University Obligations to Wild Animals: the Case of r-Strategists

Positive

As a number of commentators on animal rights theory have noted, recognizing the moral status of sentient animals entails that we owe them more than just negative obligations: positive obligations also seem to follow (Callicott 1980; Sagoff 1984). While most animal rights theorists have attempted to escape the conclusion that their position commits them to intervening in the wild (Nussbaum 2006, 373; Regan 1983, 35; Singer 1975, 238-9), Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka take a more nuanced position in their recent political theory of animal rights. They allow for small scale interventions but disallow large scale interventions

35 because the latter threaten wild animals’ collective autonomy and flourishing (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 179-87). A problem shared by even moderate non-interventionist views is that they fail to address the normative implications of different reproductive strategies. Broadly speaking, there are two evolutionary reproductive strategies species employ: the K-strategy and the r-strategy (Jeschke et al. 2008; MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Pianka 1970). The K-strategy ensures survival by restricting reproduction to a small number of offspring who are intensively cared for. The r-strategy, in contrast, ensures survival through quantity. Species employing this strategy produce large numbers of uncared for offspring, the majority of whom die shortly after hatching or birth. Though it is plausible to maintain that a policy of non-intervention is conducive to the collective flourishing of K-strategists, non-intervention in the case of rstrategists merely ensures the continuation of a massive natural tragedy (Horta 2010; Horta 2013). In my paper, I will explore the considerations relevant to articulating a response to the normative problem r-strategists pose. In addition to highlighting a number of constraints on justified intervention, I argue that for animal rights theorists, the appropriate theoretical response largely depends on whether r-strategists are members of genuine collectives. Do rstrategist species (or perhaps sub-sets of members of r-strategist species) have the requisite features needed to be more than a mere set of individuals? They might not. One of the defining features of r-strategists is the absence of certain social bonds, after all. If r-strategists are not members of collectives, then principles intended for collectives will be inapplicable to them. This suggests that a more cosmopolitan focus on individuals will be most promising (Beitz 1979; Pogge 1989; Tan 2004). If, in contrast, it turns out that r-strategists are members of collectives, then the application of a non-interventionist principle of respect for collective autonomy, though intelligible, will not be justified. What we will need are alternative principles for collectives. Principles similar to those for failed states or ‘burdened societies’ (Fuller 2012; Rawls 1999, 105-13), but which are appropriately modified for the case of wild animals, may be a promising route to take. References: Beitz, Charles R. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Callicott, J. Baird. 1980. “Animal Liberation: a Triangular Affair.” Environmental Ethics 2/4: 311-2;. Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (New York: Oxford University Press); Fulller, Lisa L. 2012. “Burdened Societies and Transitional Justice.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15/3: 369-86; Horta, Oscar. 2010. “Debunking the Idyllic View of Natural Processes.” Télos: Iberoamerican Journal of Utilitarian Studies 17: 73-88; Horta, Oscar. 2013. “Zoopolis, Intervention, and the State of Nature.” Law, Ethics, and Philosophy 1/1:113-25; Jeschke, J.M., W. Gabriel, and H. Kokko. 2008. “r-Strategists/K-Strategists.” Encyclopedia of Ecology 4: 3113-22; MacArthur, R. H., and E.O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Nussbaum, Martha C. 2007. Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press); Pianka, Eric R. 1970. “On r- and K-Selection.” The American Naturalist 104/940: 592-7.; Pogge, Thomas. 1989. Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); Rawls, John.

36 1999. The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press); Sagoff, Mark. 1984. “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 22/2: 297-307; Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books); Tan, Kok-Chor. 2004. Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Laura Wildemann Kane The Graduate Center, CUNY Civil Service and Education: Changing our View of Dependency Sibyl Schwarzenbach (2009) proposes a universal care service—a type of civil service—that aims to transform caring for others into reproductive praxis that obligates citizens to care, at least minimally, for other citizens in the state. A universal care service would require that young women and men engage in ethical reproductive work—supplementing care in community centers, working with the poor and elderly, helping out in individuals homes that need assistance –in much the same way as they are required to attend school for a certain number of years. Schwarzenbach proposes that every citizen be required to devote one to two years of service to public civic work between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. This means that the universal care service employs and educates young citizens who are in an important phase of moral development to adopt caring attitudes and behaviors; hence, it should cultivate the kind of moral development that traditional sociopolitical theories require to perpetuate a just and stable society. I incorporate these theoretical elements into an argument for a similar kind of mandatory civil service that aims to address the scope issue that critics hold against theories of care. I supplement Schwarzenbach’s account by stipulating that the civil service 1) remain open to older citizens who wish to volunteer at later times in their lives, and 2) require that all participants, at some points during the tenure of their service, hold internships (or the like) in a variety of governmental offices of their state. This second requirement has two aims: the first is to provide a transparent experience to civil service members of the inner workings of their government, and the second is to maintain public interest and regular participation in the political processes of the state. The first requirement entails a more complex argument. David Kennedy (2006) notes that the ideology of adulthood-as-autonomy implies a set of cultural norms, and these norms in turn determine beliefs, institutions, and behaviors that come to define the ways adults see and the world. These cultural norms fix the adult worldview, as well as the norms and values that are imparted into children. When these cultural norms understand dependency as a problematic state for adults, as liberal political and moral theories typically do, the values passed onto children involve a focus on becoming independent and autonomous rather than interdependent with a recognition that we are all at time dependent upon others. Similarly, Barbara Arneil (2002) argues that a push for the ethic of care in liberal theory will not be sustained without a fundamental shift in adult responsibilities of care toward one another as adults. Viewing dependency as an essential

37 feature of both childhood and adulthood encourages adults to continue their moral growth as adults (cf. Dewey, 1997). So, extending the civil service to older citizens provides them with the opportunity to continue to hone their moral capacities, especially as they relate to caring for other citizens.

Sarah Brigid Kenehan Marywood University The Duty to Assist, Political Feasibility, and Global Climate Change Much good work has been done on what justice ideally demands in the face of global climate change (GCC) (1) and similarly, very interesting literature is emerging on philosophical understandings of political feasibility (an idea traditionally considered from the point of view of Political Science). (2) However, no work has looked at the intersection of these two studies, an examination that seems vitally important given the state of current global and domestic politics. Indeed, concern for feasibility has largely been overlooked by political and social philosophers. Brennan and Pettit note that a failure of political philosophers to consider issues of feasibility, “represents a potentially serious limitation on the relevance of political philosophy for real-world policy.” (3) They further argue that ignoring the importance of feasibility will render philosophers as nothing more than visionaries, focusing on ideal systems with ends that may be impossible or even counterproductive to achieve. (4) And likewise, Miller contends that while the ideals in political philosophy need not be constrained by an appreciation of empirical facts about human nature and the like, in considering the application of the ideals, we must necessarily consider such limits. (5) Simply put, this means that social and political philosophers should take political feasibility seriously, and so should seek to identify goals and policies that are actually (if even ambitiously) achievable, not just logically possible. (6) In this spirit, the goal of this essay is to examine the feasibility of one normative theory and its applicability to GCC; specifically, I will analyze whether Rawls’s duty to assist (DA) is suitably feasible in its ability to actually frame and guide policymakers towards achieving climate stability. Notes: (1) See, for instance: Caney, Simon. “Environmental Degradation, Reparations, and the Moral Significance of History.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 464-482.; Gosseries, Axel. “Historical Emissions and Free-Riding.” Ethical Perspectives 11, no. 1 (2004): 36-60.; Meyer, Lukas and Dominic Roser. “Climate Justice and Historical Emissions.” In Critical Review of International Social and Political 13, no. 1 (2010): 229-253.; Miller, David, “Global Justice and Climate Change: How Should Responsibilities be Distributed?,” Tanner Lectures, Lecture 1, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, March 2008.; Shue, Henry. “Global Environment and International Inequality.” International Affairs 75, no. 3 (July 1999): 531-545.; and Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. Yale University Press, 2002. (This is not a comprehensive list.) (2) Consider, for instance: Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).; Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility:

38 A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies 60 (2012): 809-825.; Holly Lawford-Smith, “Understanding Political Feasibility,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 21, no. 3 (2013): 243259.; Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).; David Miller, “Political Philosophy for Earthlings,” in Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, eds. David Leopold and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. (This is not a comprehensive list.) (3) Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 258. (4) Brennan and Pettit, 261. (5) David Miller, “Political Philosophy for Earthlings,” in Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, eds. David Leopold and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. (6) This is not to say that ideal theorizing is irrelevant or unimportant. Rather, the ideal will be the standard according to which the proposals should be measured. (Pablo Gilabert, “Comparative Assessments of Justice, Political Feasibility, and Ideal Theory,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15, no. 1 (2012): 45.) That is, they will force us to consider whether the compromises embody the right sorts of virtues and values, qualitatively and quantitatively speaking. Moreover, the ideal will give us a starting point from which to critique the status-quo, and as such will offer us direction towards “justice enhancement” and “injustice reduction”. (Gilabert, 47.) Similarly, David Estlund argues that feasibility requirements should not shape our ideal theorizing. (David Estlund, “Human Nature and the Limits (if Any) of Political Philosophy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39, no. 3 (2011): 207 - 237.) (7) Rawls, The Law of Peoples, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 37. As climate change is a problem comprised of many moral and political difficulties, this essay will look at just one piece of the larger issue: what developed nations owe developing nations in the context of mitigating and adapting to GCC. To begin, I will argue that the Law of Peoples is a morally desirable starting point, given the role that well-orderedness plays in Rawls’s theory. In short, well-orderedness is justified according to the protection it affords individuals in exercising their autonomy, a foundational and non-arbitrary moral good. And, Rawls’s duty to assist, is tied to this important threshold: “Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living in unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.” (7) That is, developed peoples (or, in Rawls’s words, well-ordered peoples) have special obligations of justice to move undeveloped nations (i.e., burdened peoples) closer to well-orderedness, a status that is made more difficult for many nations given the dangerous consequences of GCC. After working out some possibilities for the content of the DA as a response to GCC, I will test these proposals for feasibility. Based on this analysis, scholars and policy makers will have a better idea of whether or not Rawls’s Law of Peoples, and the conceptions of fairness and justice it embodies and reflects, is a viable starting point for framing climate negotiations going forward.

Joshua Keton The Graduate Center, CUNY How public is just right? Public reason in the classroom

39 On the one hand, it seems plausible that we should want public education to promote social stability, instill civic virtue, and encourage civic engagement—at least to the extent that the state is just. On the other, a uniform, compulsory liberal education would likely lead to the decline of minority cultures. The more we respect and promote multiculturalism, the less stable and unified we can expect political culture to become. However, the more we educate to the principles of political liberalism, the less well such cultures are likely to do. How are we to settle this dilemma? John Rawls proposed his idea of an overlapping consensus along with its ideal of public reason in response to just this sort of problem, but his discussion of education in his later work is very brief. Various theorists have taken up the issue and there debate between proponents of multicultural education and proponents of liberal education over the role of education in generating and maintaining social stability, civic virtues, and civic engagement versus the potential costs of such education to minority cultures. I argue that principles of public reason have their place in the classroom. However, I also argue for a view that sees principles of public reason that apply at various levels of society to be nested in such a way that these principles have a wider scope in some spheres than others. As such, I conclude that principles of political liberalism as applied to the question of civic education are likely to actually endorse, rather than oppose, minority cultures in educational institutions.

Audra L. King Central Connecticut State University Transformative Mainstreaming: Placing intersectionality at the heart of development Gender Mainstreaming (GM) was established as an official development strategy by the United Nations in 1995. The subsequent adoption of GM by major development organizations was celebrated by many, particularly feminist advocates, as a major success in the fight for gender equality and justice. Unfortunately, the reality of GM has failed to live up to its transformative promise. As a result of GM’s failures, some are calling for a shift away from a gender-based approach and toward a more holistic intersectional approach, also known as Diversity Mainstreaming (DM). Like GM, DM is conceived as a social justice project that aims to challenge and transform biased and exclusionary policy and ensure more equitable and effective development. However, DM is said to surpass GM in its transformative potential by placing intersectionality at the center of development policy. My paper examines the transformative value of DM relative to GM. While I agree that DM has greater transformative potential than GM, I contend that the realization of this potential requires a shift in dominant aid-based or distributive understandings of development, which tend to ignore or obscure the central importance of structural justice concerns. Instead, DM must be situated within a substantive account of just development that gives primary emphasis to the importance of structural justice. Such an account will not only limit the likelihood of cooptation and depoliticization, but it will also foster a clearer understanding of the mainstreaming process, including how it should be understood (e.g., as a technocratic versus political process), who should be included, and in what capacity they are to participate (as objects of research, as consultants, or as equal participants).

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Jennifer Kling University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Justifying the State Right of Self-Defense States often justify their decision to engage in defensive warfare by claiming that they have a right of self-defense. Commonly, the claim that states have rights of self-defense that sometimes justify going to war is supported by appeal to the so-called domestic analogy, which likens states to individuals. The analogy claims that just as individuals have rights of selfdefense that sometimes justify the use of lethal force, so too do states have rights of selfdefense that sometimes justify going to war. But while the domestic analogy is both intuitively persuasive and a pervasive idea in the study of global justice and international relations, it does not succeed in justifying the claim that states have rights of self-defense. More specifically, whatever reasons we have for accepting that individuals have rights of selfdefense, such reasons do not provide grounds for concluding that states have rights of selfdefense as well, for two main reasons. The first is that individuals and states operate in vastly different contexts, and the second is that individuals and states are metaphysically very different entities. So, I conclude that just war theorists cannot justify the claim that states have rights of self-defense by appeal to the domestic analogy. However, this does not mean that we are stuck with the conclusion that states do not have rights of self-defense that sometimes justify going to war. States do have rights of self-defense when they fulfill their primary protective role, that is, when they are organized so as to provide the protection that their populations deserve. Individuals deserve such protection because they have individual rights of self-defense (in virtue of having dignity) that they cannot effectively promote in the absence of a state. Such state protection involves the state recognizing and respecting the dignity of its individuals via its deliberative processes, laws, institutions, and policies. When states fail to recognize and respect the dignity of the members of their populations in these ways, they do not have state rights of self-defense. It follows that inter-state interventions against such states are not straightforwardly ruled out as rights violations, but instead may be justified in certain circumstances.

Joseph H. Kupfer Iowa State University Criminal Justice, Restitution, and the Ethic of Care Restitutive justice is typically contrasted with the standard conceptions of criminal justice and punishment found in retributivism and utilitarianism. But restitution itself is enriched when informed by an ethics of care. In contrast to the abstractions that characterize the traditional theories, a restitutive view that implements the care ethic will focus on the effects of the crime on these particular victims with their histories, and attend to specific ways offenders can compensate victims and community. Therefore, theorists who embrace the ethic of care should favor restitution over (or alongside) alternatives of criminal justice. Conversely, those who find restitution attractive ought to take seriously the considerations recommended by the

41 ethic of care. Moreover, moral education that cultivates attitudes and habits of care is likely to nurture appreciation of restitutive justice. The ethic of care begins with the social self, emphasizing human connectedness and social relationships. Meeting the needs of people and maintaining relationships is paramount. Because it deals with individuals in their particular historical relationships, considerations of care operate at the level of concreteness and narrative context rather than abstract principles-of justice, freedom, or the common good, for example. People have responsibilities because of the relationships they are in, many of which they do not choose, as in family ties. We need not resolve here the question whether restitution is a form of punishment, but can treat restitution as a kind of criminal justice that differs from retributivism (narrowly understood) and utilitarianism. Restitution itself is an abstract principle asserting that when one individual unjustly harms another, he owes the victim compensation. In his influential formulation of restitution, Randy Barnett interprets restitution from the abstract individualistic perspective of the classical theories of punishment. He defines justice in terms of equality and the rights possessed by independent individuals, conceiving restitution primarily as monetary compensation. By infusing abstract principles of justice with a care ethic, however, we respond to criminal conduct in a manner that is more comprehensive and perhaps just. The goal of restitutive practice is to restore: to restore victims as much as possible to their condition prior to harm; to restore the community to its previous condition; the offender to a healthier relationship with victim and community. Wherever possible, the criminal should play an active role in restitution. So often punishment is something visited upon the criminal; whereas, we make restitution. By directly engaging in restitutive performance, the offender has the opportunity to restore self-respect and community standing. This is why even crimes of the till may call for active participation and not merely monetary compensation. Restitution from a physician who bilks Medicare, for example, might include unpaid work in clinics in under-served areas. Besides providing the labor for which she had been fraudulently remunerated, the physician meets the needs of particular individuals with her expertise. Should the wayward physician also develop habits of compassion and commitment, she would indeed have been restored, both to herself and as a valuable asset to society.

David J. Leichter Marian University Taking Care of the Past: Materiality and Representation in the Philosophy of History On November 21st, 2014, the Texas State Board of Education approved eighty-nine products for eight different social studies courses that will be introduced in the upcoming 2015-2016 school year, which will be used in Texas public schools for at least the next decade. These

42 changes came after the state adopted a controversial curriculum in 2010, which would, among other things, question the role that humans play in climate change, downplay the importance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War, and emphasize the influence of Moses on the Founding Fathers. Because Texas controls a significant portion of the market for textbooks, this change is predicted to affect classrooms across the country. The debate over what to include in history books is a familiar part of the politics of education. It has long been acknowledged that debates over social studies and history curricula matter because the way that students understand possibilities for acting in the present is, as the argument goes, shaped by the way that they understand the past. As a result, narratives about American identity influence how students understand possibilities for political action, which in turn helps to configure new civic and political identities. These recent debates, in other words, offer an occasion to raise questions about the complicated connection between power, ideology, and authority. The debate over what to include or exclude from history textbooks, traditionally framed, suggests that the epistemological problem of knowing the past is a problem of memory and representation: that is, it assumes that there is a gap between the present and the past and uses narratives to bridge that gap. The central claim in this paper, however, is that there is an important distinction to be made between the ways that the past is represented and the ways that the past remains in the present through things. In particular, I argue that by attending to the remains of the past, we can learn how to “take care” of the past. The shift in focus from representation to materiality changes the relationship to the past in ways that calls attention to new ways of retelling history and engaging it critically. Focusing on materiality shifts the focus from a past that is no longer here to one that concerns the ways the past continues and presses into the present despite those explicit attempts to suppress or codify it through explicit narratives. I conclude by indicating how this shift will affect the ways that we teach and learn about the past.

Chris Lowry University of Waterloo Parental Decision-Making and the Aboriginal Right to Pursue Traditional Medicine This paper examines ethical issues concerning the aboriginal right to pursue traditional medicine and the recent Ontario Court of Justice ruling that “such a right cannot be qualified as a right only if it is proven to work by employing the western medical paradigm.” In that case, the court concluded that the aboriginal right to pursue traditional medicine includes the right of a parent to refuse chemotherapy for a child, in a case where the physicians expected an 80-90% chance of survival with chemotherapy and certain death from leukemia without. In previous cases not involving aboriginal rights, the courts denied parents the right to refuse life-saving treatment for a child whenever the chance of survival with the treatment was high. A feature of the Canadian constitution begins to explain why the court ruled differently in the aboriginal case. In non-aboriginal cases, the courts used the ‘Oakes test’ to justify limits on parental medical decision-making rights. The Oakes test applies only to Charter rights, and so

43 not to aboriginal rights. Instead, the ‘Sparrow test’ applies, which has at least two morally significant features: (i) it allows the state to place limits on aboriginal rights for certain purposes, including to prevent harm to others, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal; and (ii) subject to those limits, it requires the state to give priority to aboriginal rights over related non-aboriginal rights. For example, because of (ii), aboriginal fishing takes priority over commercial and sport fishing, but because of (i), harm prevention and resource conservation trump both. Should the court have required chemotherapy to be resumed in order to prevent harm? And, what actions should be taken in a health care context in order to give suitable priority to aboriginal rights? Concerning the first question, we must first ask whether requiring chemotherapy would infringe on the aboriginal right to pursue traditional medicine. Does fulfillment of the right simply require that chemotherapy be provided in a way that does not block simultaneous access to traditional medicines? Or does the right give the parent unconditional discretion to make medical decisions for her child according to her personal understanding of the principles behind her people’s traditional medicine? Second, if requiring chemotherapy would infringe on the right, we must ask whether the infringement is justified. When a parent denies a child essential medical care, this is considered harm. Does withdrawing a child from chemotherapy in favour of traditional medicine count as denying essential medical care? The court concluded that this question should not be settled by asking western medical experts, but then failed to specify how it should be settled. If the parent sincerely believes that her traditional medicine treatment plan for her child will work, is that enough? If not, then what? The courts defended the justifiability of limiting aboriginal fishing rights by appealing to (western?) conservation science. It seems odd, then, not to require evidence of the chosen treatment plan’s effectiveness against leukemia.

Kirsty Leanne Macfarlane La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia Talent, Circumstances, and Equality of Opportunity in Education There is a general consensus that equality of opportunity is an important ideal in education. Proponents of equal opportunity in education typically emphasise that irrelevant social circumstances should not affect the educational opportunities children have. However, many egalitarians recognise that inequalities in natural talent are equally problematic, as social circumstances and natural talent are both morally arbitrary. If the aim is to alleviate the impact of both social and natural factors on educational opportunities, though, we move towards equality of educational outcomes because it is questionable whether any factor can legitimate unequal educational outcomes. Even choices may be irrelevant when it comes to education; children are not fully autonomous so it may not be appropriate to hold them responsible for their decisions. Nevertheless, when people promote the importance of equal educational opportunities it is not generally equal outcomes that they aspire to, indeed, people often turn to the ideal of equal opportunity because they do not believe societies should aim for equal outcomes in education. Many egalitarians thus set the issue of natural

44 talent aside and focus on developing a meritocratic conception of equality of opportunity which requires that the influence social circumstances have in education be reduced. This paper explores how egalitarians should handle the role of natural talent in education. It examines some of the main theories of equal opportunity for education that take into account the impact of inequalities in social circumstances but not natural talent. It will argue that these theories are inconsistent and that a sound principle of equal educational opportunity must address the impact of differences in natural talent. However, theories of educational equality that are sensitive to differences in natural talent have counter-intuitive consequences, ultimately collapsing into equality of outcome. The paper will demonstrate that these problems can be avoided. It will develop a theoretical justification for a meritocratic conception of equal educational opportunity and provide reasons why it is legitimate to focus on addressing the impact of social circumstances on education. Justifying why it is appropriate to address the effect unequal social circumstances have on educational opportunities but not the influence of inequalities in natural talent means educational egalitarians can preserve their focus on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome without being inconsistent. The paper will argue that ultimately this allows for a compelling account of the ideal of equal opportunity in education.

Michelle Maiese Emmanuel College Enactivism, Embodiment, and Transformative Learning O’Sullivan et al. (2002) maintain that “transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions” and describe it as “a shift of consciousness that dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world” (18). No doubt such transformation is epistemic in the sense that it gives students access to knowledge that they did not have prior to the learning experience. But in addition, this experience is personally transformative: it alters students’ perspective, interpretations, and responses, and also involves changes in the way that they feel about themselves and their surroundings. This personal transformation, in turn, can facilitate new insights and thereby expand students’ knowledge. But how should personal transformation be understood from the perspective of cognitive science? For many years, the prevailing view among philosophers and cognitive scientists has been that mindedness is essentially inner and always and everywhere neurally realized. According to proponents of what Andy Clark (2008) calls ‘BRAINBOUND’, cognition is simply a matter of computing information according to the brain’s internal rules that then instruct the body how to act. On this view, personal transformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new “programs” that can guide a subject’s behavior. However, the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years suggests a different way to conceptualize the changes associated with transformative learning.

45 Such work maintains that there is “a unique, non-trivial, and cognitively limiting role for the body in the determination of mental states” (Kiverstein and Clark, 2009, 2), and that the form and dynamics of the body partially constitute cognition. Enactivism also emphasizes that creatures like us do not simply passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather actively participate in the generation of meaning. Furthermore, it stresses that the study of the organism as a living system and the study of the organism as a subject of experience should complement each other (Colombetti 2013). From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformation is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves; and it is not just a lived experience, but also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather something that they actively do. And since “sense-making” is a matter of an organism’s inhabiting and responding to a world that is significant for it, there is good reason to think that cognitive shifts are necessarily affective and thoroughly bound up with a creature’s particular cares and concerns. My paper aims to build on this existing work and examine how it might be utilized to investigate the nature of transformative learning and better understand the significant experiential and neurobiological changes it entails. Sabrina Martin Oxford University International Trade as a Subject of Justice “The global economic order is unjust!” So goes the battle cry of the post-Rawlsian, liberal theorists of global justice. Trade has been a concern of global justice since Charles Beitz highlighted it as a fundamental cause of global inequalities in 1979. More economicallydeveloped countries take advantage of less economically-developed countries (LEDCs) by exploiting their inexpensive resources and production capabilities. Initially, theorists like Beitz and Thomas Pogge worked on solutions to this issue that were allencompassing or big picture attempts to apply justice to the entirety of a global basic structure. Yet these post-Rawlsian attempts to assert the existence of a global basic structure (or attempts to find grounds for the establishment of one) have proven largely unsuccessful, as little agreement can be reached on what exactly constitutes a global basic structure and whether or not one exists. As a consequence, literature on justice is now trending towards ways to circumvent the problem and examining specific areas of the global order, such as trade. Trade, at least upon initial examination, seems like a good place to start in examining the underlying problems with the global economic order, and consequently a worthy candidate as a subject or site of justice, because without trade countries would not be imposing unfair economic burdens on one another. That is, under autarky, or the state of being self-sufficient through isolationism and not trading, states would not be subject to the rules of the global order that so often end up hurting them.

46 This paper takes up the question “why do countries trade?”” and looks to ground trade as a site of justice. In other words, what is special about trade, how does this interaction put actors in special relationships, and, in turn, in what way do these relationships trigger obligations of justice. I approach these questions by looking at the moral grounding for international markets. This paper is part of a larger project attempting to provide a holistic theory of trade justice, grounded in development economics, by which we can evaluate what constitutes (greater) trade justice. Following David Miller, I broadly define trade as “. . . a practice that involves the voluntary exchange of commodities or services for mutual advantage. That means, selfevidently, that both trading partners expect to be better off as a result of their exchange.” The development economic aspect, then becomes important because the “mutual advantage”• that countries gain from trade must be benefiting economically in some way.

David Matthew Georgetown University Regulation of Bodies as Gendered Nationalistic Ideology: Physically Wounded Veterans as Political Props In this paper I examine the way that physically-wounded U.S. veterans receiving the focus of a public, patriotic, hero-worshipping discourse, while the psychologically and emotionally wounded are left hidden and unspoken of, perpetuates and strengthens a notion of masculinity that imagines the body as simply a tool of the mind and a body wounded in the service of the nation as a mark of honor, while an injured mind in the same service remains a disgrace and a source of shame. I argue that Cory Remsburg, a 10-time deployed Army Ranger severely wounded in Afghanistan, being held up and applauded in the 2014 State of the Union Address (and not 22 empty chairs to represent the daily veteran suicide count, for example) does disciplining work in terms of defining acceptable, normative veteran identities and bodies as those that may be physically wounded, but are mentally strong, regulating an appropriate patriotic and nationalistic sacrificial masculinity that views physical injury as the ultimate display of devotion to the country, and subjectifying future veterans by demonstrating those types of veteran bodies that are held up and applauded. Ultimately, this disciplinary process moves the focus away from individual heroic actions in combat and war, and instead places a wide-spread, abstract focus on the heroic choice to join the all-volunteer military force, which reduces the vast and varied experiences of all veterans to one standard, abstract, disconnected hero identity with the result being the wider populations’ mere attempt to “thank veterans for their service,” rather than more deeply engage with actual veterans’ issues. In my paper, I use the works of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Mary Parker Follett as the philosophical support for my investigation.

D. C. Matthew York University Racism, Racial Discrimination and Racial Injustice: How They Are, and Are Not, Related

47 In this paper I discuss the relationship between racism, racial discrimination and racial injustice and show how these concepts, and related phenomena, are, and are not, related. The paper starts by explaining racial injustice. If, as seems plausible, a racially just society is a society in which race plays no part in the distribution of effective rights or rightful opportunities, then a racially unjust society is a society in which race plays some role in the distribution of effective rights or rightful opportunities. From this I suggest that something is an instance of racial injustice if it involves the use of race to violate person’s effective rights or diminish their rightful opportunities. It then turns to racial discrimination, which is understood in terms of differential treatment because of a person’s perceived racial identity. I suggest, however, that when we say that ‘X discriminates against A,’ we should not take this to say anything at all about whether X wrongs A, though of course this may sometimes be true. In other words, I suggest that ‘discrimination’ should be used in an evaluatively neutral sense, in contrast to the more common moralized sense in which to say that X discriminate against A is to say that X wrongfully treats A differently. From there I argue that while racial discrimination is arguably necessary for racial injustice, the same, surprisingly, cannot be said for racism; there can be racial injustice without racism. Racism, I first argue, should be understood disjunctively in terms of beliefs or attitudes. But unexpressed racist attitudes and beliefs, I then suggest, are distributively impotent if unaccompanied by discriminatory behavior. For this reason there is some reason to think that racial discrimination is necessary for the existence of racial injustice. By contrast, some of the outcomes we would not hesitate to describe as instances of racial injustice can be produced by acts of discrimination that fail to conform to the disjunctive analysis of racism—nor, I add, is it plausible to defend a behavioral account of racism such that if X is an instance of racial discrimination, then X is ipso facto an instance of racism. In other words, I suggest that we should distinguish between racial discrimination and racist discrimination such that while every instance of the latter is, obviously, an instance of the former, the reverse is not true. Moreover, I suggest that there are many instances of the former that are not instances of the latter. But I also argue that just because an instance of racial discrimination is not an instance of racist discrimination it does not follow that the discrimination is not wrongful; the category of wrongful racial discrimination is broader than the category of racist discrimination. The paper concludes by showing how the preceding analysis can make sense of certain racial phenomena (like racial profiling and race-based dating) that commonly tend to engender confusion.

Seth Mayer Auburn University Democracy and the Informal Sphere

48 Centralized institutions authorize some of the normatively structured practices and judgments that govern our lives, but many of these practices emerge from everyday interactions. Centrally authorized normative structures make up what I call the formal sphere of society, while the normative structures that emerge from everyday interactions make up the informal sphere. While democratic theorists have proposed numerous theories of the formal sphere, they have not developed systematic approaches to the informal sphere, which is much less often discussed. This paper offers a way forward, providing a framework for comparing competing tendencies in democratic theorists’ approaches to the informal sphere. I conclude that democratic theorists cannot avoid theorizing about the informal sphere, given its important role in realizing democracy. First, I delineate two sorts of democratic ideals. The first, site ideals, designate social spheres as locations where democracy is to be realized and outline what the realization of democracy in that sphere involves. The second, source ideals, designate certain social spheres as potential causal factors in realizing democratic ends. Next, after noting several places of general agreement, I outline areas of disagreement amongst democratic theorists who address the informal sphere. In particular, I look at (1) whether the informal sphere is a site of democracy and (2) whether it can be a source for shaping its own democratic qualities. I spell out four different approaches to these questions. Three of these views suggest that the formal sphere is the central site and source of democracy, while the informal sphere has either a very limited role or none at all. Some approaches that downplay the informal sphere’s significance object to requiring the informal sphere to realize democratic ideals. Others suggest we lack appropriate means to shape the informal sphere democratically, even if doing so would otherwise be desirable. A third perspective claims that a properly constituted formal sphere will automatically bring about a democratized informal sphere, rendering democratic theories focused on the informal sphere irrelevant. I argue that all three of the aforementioned approaches are flawed. Instead, I put forward a view that sees the informal sphere as both a significant democratic source and site. I argue that this reciprocal view fits better with our intuitive judgments about what it takes to realize democracy. As a result of the informal sphere’s significance, democratic theorists are faced with the challenge of determining what sort of site ideal we ought to apply to it. We must take up the task of trying to understand what developing a democratic ethos demands.

Ian McDaniel The University of Kansas Compelled Concessions: the movement among egalitarians and sufficientarians toward a shared conception of educational justice The demand for educational justice has divided into two prominent camps: egalitarians and sufficientarians. These two positions, commonly defined by notions of equality and adequacy respectively, are often perceived as incompatible or antagonistic alternatives in the attempt to realize educational justice within society. One can interpret the adequacy view as being concerned first and foremost with establishing a minimal threshold of educational

49 achievement, a floor below which no educable child is allowed to fall. Equality, by contrast, is not concerned with establishing a floor. Rather, equality seems to demand initially that no gap exists between the educational opportunities of those that achieve at the highest level and those at the lowest level. Adequacy theorists charge egalitarians with failing to respect the value of education because equality theories necessitate lower levels of education in the name of equality. Egalitarians charge adequacy theorists with failing to grasp the positional nature of education as a societal good and that this failure leads to unfair treatment of individuals. Adequacy theorists argue that equality fails to respect the autonomy of the family and the importance of parents in educating children. Equality theorists argue that adequacy has a detrimental impact on the self-worth of individuals who receive unequal levels of education. These pressures are among those applied by opponents of equality and adequacy to the respective views. I argue that a proper analysis of these two conceptions of educational justice reveals that, rather than being antagonistic, egalitarian and sufficientarian views of educational justice are in fact mutually compatible views of educational justice and educational opportunity. Rather than being opposing conceptions of the demand for educational justice, when their requirements are presented in a reasonable fashion, equality and adequacy views of educational justice entail the same demands for fairness in educational opportunity. The benefit of this perspective on educational justice is that it resolves one debate concerning the requirements of educational justice and educational opportunity that is no longer necessary and potentially detracts focus from resolving prominent issues of injustice and unfairness concerning educational opportunity in society.

Sarah Clark Miller Penn State University The Normative Implications of Transnational Sexual Violence for Global Gender Justice This paper examines a gender-specific issue of justice arising in and through globalization, namely, transnational sexual violence. I begin by considering both the theoretical and empirical benefits and potential pitfalls of positing a transnational theory of sexual violence against women. What good might result from conceptualizing sexual violence as a transnational or global phenomenon? What risks—such as essentializing or constructing implicit false universals—does such a move entail? Do the benefits ultimately outweigh the risks? Answering these questions requires thinking through sexual violence in deeply interdisciplinary and intersectional ways, which is a main methodology I employ throughout the paper. I argue that taking the underexplored issue of transnational sexual violence as our starting point for an examination of global justice—rather than the much more commonly treated issues of famine or disease—makes plain the ways in which much of the global justice literature is insensitive to gendered dimensions, as well as generally inadequate from a feminist theoretical standpoint. In short, transnational sexual violence quickly pushes global justice to its conceptual limits. Recognition of this problem serves as an opportunity to transform discourses of global justice, highlighting the importance of concepts such as interdependence, need, and vulnerability instead of more standard concepts such as independence, autonomy, and universalism. Regarding transnational causes of sexual violence specifically, I argue that we must understand transnational sexual violence as a social and

50 political fact arising from necessarily complex histories, rather than as ‘natural’ or representative of how some cultures treat ‘their’ women. Just as is the case for examinations of famine and disease, understanding transnational sexual violence acontextually results in analyses that are deeply flawed and, in fact, that can perpetrate conceptual violence. Throughout the paper I consider multiple examples of transnational violence, focusing most intently on sexual violence on the U.S.-Mexico border and on the ongoing conflict in Darfur. Thus the paper also treats gendered aspects of a traditional topic in global justice, namely, war and conflict.

Randall Morris William Jewell College James, Hobhouse, and the Rational Good In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” William James models the job of the moral philosopher after that of scientists. Each begins with a set of empirical facts and then attempts to “weave them into the unity of a stable system.” Moral philosophy begins with the ideals found within the existing world. These ideals are the values created by sentient beings. Good and evil are not objective qualities found in the nature of things, but are realized in the minds of sentient beings. James is advocating a form of subjective naturalism in which consciousness makes an ideal right by feeling it to be right, and wrong by feeling it to be wrong. “[T]he essence of good,” he writes, “is simply to satisfy demand.” James goes on to say that each and every desire creates a claim to satisfaction and that there exists an obligation wherever there is a claim. In other words, James appears to derive an ought from an is. The problem, of course, which James acknowledges, is that subjective values, and hence claims and obligations, conflict. Denying the existence of a pre-existing, abstract moral order by which we can evaluate the “validity” of those claims, how do we adjudicate the competing desires? Practical necessity demands the subordination of some ideals to others. The problem is finding an impartial test to accomplish this task. Not resigning himself to skepticism, James believes that “over all these individual opinions there is a system of truth.” His way forward is to adopt a utilitarian principle: “Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy . . . be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act . . . which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions.”• The persuasiveness of this approach rests upon James’ assertion that a subjective desire not only creates value, but generates a correlative obligation. He offers no argument for this idea. How can James move from a subjective origin of value to an objective criterion of obligation? This is a question that L. T. Hobhouse tackled a few decades later in The Rational Good (1921). Like James, Hobhouse views moral philosophy as analogous to science. Right and wrong, he says, stand to the will much as true and false stand to the judgment. In the processes which establish what is right we can find something “analogous to the reason which determines what is true.” Hobhouse identifies criteria we use to judge subjective opinions and ideas to

51 be true and rational and then applies those criteria to evaluate value judgments. The ‘system of truth’ Hobhouse articulates is a coherence theory of ethics and rights that fills the lacunae in James’ argument.

DeeDee Mower Weber State University Deviance to Diminish Educational Disparity The recent emphasis on Common Core Curriculum perpetuates a national hegemonic discourse that controlled curriculum will reduce the current existing achievement gaps. This belief in hegemony creates an educational conundrum since we know that schools across the nation currently have vastly differing national testing outcomes as a result of not just the curriculum but from teaching practices as well. It is the discourses about teacher pedagogical differences to which I frame this paper. I propose that the differing teaching practices must come from differing disciplining of teachers. I use Michel Foucault’s framework of technologies (the goods and services provided to encourage particular practices or behaviors) as a guide to understand how teachers become a technological component that receive governance. Through this governance, pedagogical practices are perceived as similar yet may be vastly different. I utilize three of Foucault’s technologies to understand the differences in teacher practices. The first being governmental technologies, which are the rules and regulations that confine pedagogical practices. Second, the consumer technologies or the goods (products) and services needed to sustain the rules that regulate pedagogy. Third is organizational technology, or ways in which one might police and govern the use of the pedagogical practices. The apex of differing pedagogical practices among teachers seems to be in the teachers’ personal compliance, fidelity and deviance to the prescribed “best” teaching practices. The rules and regulations for pedagogy as described in professional development courses are restrictive and coincide with prepackaged materials with specified guidelines. The teaching materials are initially generated to help struggling students and concentrate teacher pedagogy on direct and explicit instruction. The materials themselves are instrumental in sustaining teacher and student behavior as it sustains the product itself. A fixation on teacher input and student output helps push assessments as a default extension of curriculum. With the materials and regulations permeating best practices, differences in teacher pedagogy can only come from noncompliance, infidelity and deviance. These negatively connotative descriptors would suggest that these are not the sorts of teachers you would want in your school. I propose that it is in fact these notorious teachers that utilize non-directive but effective teaching practices that provide students with greater epistemic logic to be successful with the core curriculum. Teachers that are able to circumvent the specified pedagogies with other relevant and reliable teaching practices will be able to do so if they have limited organizational technologies in their school. Surveillance practices can create the biggest difference among schools in both

52 pedagogical differences and testing score outcomes. Even though no single entity manages or directs teacher pedagogy, technologies work to control what pedagogies can and cannot exist. Surveillance is exemplified in the latitude a teacher can take in choosing pedagogical practices. Often low performing schools are thick with mainstream, normalized practices with accompanying data that push teachers through the sludge of curriculum, policy, and assessments. There is optimism that detours, divergent, and deviant pedagogy might allow low testing schools to see successes.

Gordon B. Mower Education and Civic Involvement

Brigham Young University

In her 2012 book, No Citizen Left Behind, Meira Levinson makes a case for what she calls a ‘civic empowerment gap.’ This gap marks a differential between privileged and underprivileged groups with respect to abilities “to influence public deliberation or decision making.” One approach, a liberal approach, to ameliorating problems of this sort seeks to change the conduct in question through education. Levinson herself takes this approach in advocating a resurgent civic education in order to close the civic empowerment gap. I will argue that there are at least three problems with liberal approaches like Levinson’s to civic education that are probably best rectified by republican considerations. First, there is a Humean motivational problem. Hume tells us that reason by itself is incapable of motivating action. Hume’s doctrine has generally been extended to include all purely cognitive states as inert. The Humean view poses a challenge to any civic education that proposes altering civic conduct only through the instrument of raising cognitive awareness. Second, Sarah Conly in her 2013 book Against Autonomy: A Defense of Coercive Paternalism suggests that liberal educational programs have proven to be ineffective in altering conduct because they exaggerate the human capacity for reasoning toward ends. Conly presents a range of evidence on cognitive biases that intervene in means-ends reasoning and cause that reasoning to go astray. This reasoning failure implies that if civic education merely teaches that civic activity is a means to achieving the accepted end of a more desirable state of affairs, that means is unlikely to be selected due to cognitive failures in reasoning processes. Conly herself suggests that more coercive measures are necessary for altering conduct toward accepted and received ends. With respect to civic conduct, though, this idea is in keeping with traditional civic republican attitudes. The introduction of greater coercion into civic education, however, runs up hard against the liberal prioritization of liberty, including freedoms to choose both one’s own ends and one’s own means, over other civic values. This leads to the third problem: private life, as Will Kymlicka has pointed out, is rich and desirable in the contemporary world, and there are opportunity costs associated with public involvement. The liberal view must respect the freedom to prefer private life over public involvement, but this freedom appears to undermine

53 the necessity of greater civic involvement. Levinson recognizes that the well-being of democratic institutions requires an actively involved citizenry who have accepted the opportunity costs. The line of reasoning developed here suggests as civic republicans have been telling us all along that an unrestricted freedom using an instrumental liberal education cannot develop those qualities in citizens that are necessary to promulgate viable democratic institutions.

Jan Narveson University of Waterloo How Epistemic Responsibility carries over into Moral Responsibility Is it possible to hold people responsible for epistemic shortcomings? The short answer is Yes. Much evil (and much good also, no doubt) is motivated, for example, by religious beliefs. (I concentrate on religion in particular in this paper, but take it to be but one of many possible areas in which epistemic malfeasance is not only possible but likely, and important.) But those beliefs typically illustrate epistemic shortcomings. Insofar as the actor is sincere, those shortcomings contribute directly to his wrongful actions. Thought and action are closely connected - surely no surprise there. And it may be crucial, in many cases, in attempting to deal with those evils, to confront the agent with those epistemic shortcomings. Indeed, that’s where some philosophy can come in handy.

Mark Navin Oakland University Prioritizing Religion: The Case of Vaccine Exemption Policies Children in every state except Mississippi and West Virginia may be exempted from school vaccination requirements if their parents object for religious reasons. In twenty-nine states, only religious objectors may receive exemptions, while in nineteen states exemptions may also be granted to people who have secular objections (sometimes called ‘philosophical’ or ‘personal belief’ objections). Even in these states, religious objectors often enjoy special treatment. For example, religiously-motivated vaccine refusers in California need only to state that they have religious objections, while secular objectors must meet with a physician or complete an online education module. In this paper, I reflect upon US vaccine exemption policies to defend the following claims about religious exemptions. First, the best political justification for exemptions, as such, does not also justify prioritizing exemptions for religious objectors. Second, prioritizing exemptions for religious objectors generates perverse incentives. Finally, expansive conceptions of ‘religion’ are unlikely to be sufficient to defend priority treatment for religious objectors. First, the best political justification for exemption policies begins with the idea that people have a reason to reject laws that compel them to act contrary to their sincere and deeply-held convictions. Coercing someone to act against her conscience shows her insufficient respect and is unjust, especially if an exemption policy could protect both her conscience and the

54 goals that are promoted by the law to which she objects. (This argument is consistent with diverse forms of public reason liberalism.) Importantly, there is nothing intrinsic to a religious conviction that makes it more sincere or more deeply-held than a secular conviction. And there is nothing else about religious beliefs, as such, that makes religious objectors face greater psychological, emotional, and existential harms (at the prospect of being compelled to act contrary to conscience) than the harms that a similarly situated secular objector would face. Consider that some vaccine refusers (though not many of them) object to vaccines because they contain materials derived from aborted fetuses. Their objection to participating in (what they believe to be) the moral evil of abortion may arise from either secular or religious reasons, since there are both religious and secular reasons to condemn abortion. And since the harms involved in coercing vaccination would be similar in both cases, the reasons in favor of vaccine exemptions, as such, do not also count in favor of a general policy of prioritizing exemptions for religious believers. Second, prioritizing exemptions for people who object for religious reasons generates perverse incentives. It encourages people to lie. Consider that states that prioritize vaccine exemptions for people with religious objections have dramatically higher rates of religious exemptions than do states that offer exemptions to both religious and secular objectors. Of course, it is very hard (perhaps impossible) to determine whether any particular vaccine refuser is lying about the origins of his objection. So, the lying objector faces almost no downside, even though granting excessive exemptions to vaccine laws may have socially harmful consequences. I think the fact that a law incentivizes people to lie in order to act in accordance with what they think (secular) morality requires is a (defeasible) reason to reject that law. Furthermore, if an alternative law can achieve the same goals without providing (as much of) an incentive to lie, then this is a reason to endorse the alternative law. In the case of vaccine refusal, these two reasons count in favor of eliminating religious priority in exemption laws, if doing so is consistent with promoting high vaccination rates. Third, it might seem like we could preserve preferential treatment for religious objectors, in a politically justifiable way, and without incentivizing bad behavior, if we embraced an expansive conception of ‘religion’. For example, we might follow the US Supreme Court, which held in Seeger and Welsh that an objection is religious just in case (1) it is “sincere and meaningful,” (2) the reasons for the objection play a similar role in the objector’s life as religious reasons play in a religious person’s life, and (3) it is not for reasons of “policy, pragmatism, or expediency.” (The Court has interpreted (3) to include reasons that are “scientific.:) According to this expansionary conception, a religious objection is something like an especially weighty moral objection with non-naturalistic origins, while a secular objection results from prudential considerations or from moral considerations that are not very weighty. But in the case of vaccine refusal (and perhaps in other cases of conscientious objection), the distinction between prudential objections and weighty moral objections seems untenable. For example, a parent may object to school vaccination requirements because she believes vaccines will harm her child, and because she believes that she has a stringent moral duty to protect her child from avoidable harms. More thoroughly deflationary accounts of religion could ‘baptize’ cases

55 like this one, but they risk losing contact with notions of ‘religion’ that cohere with our ordinary use of that term.

Catlyn Origitano Marquette University Imagining Adorno’s ‘Education after Auschwitz’ In the aftermath of national or international tragedies, appeals for action such as “Never Forget” or “Never Again” are ubiquitous. Theodor Adorno makes a similar call in the wake of the Holocaust, though he places the burden for action at education’s feet, proclaiming, “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.” While all can agree with such a statement, practically how do we respond to such a call, specifically in light of Adorno’s work? Answering this question will be at the heart of my project and I argue that a highly imaginative education can fulfill Adorno’s criteria for post-Auschwitz education. In “Education After Auschwitz,” Adorno argues that in order to prevent another genocide like Auschwitz, we must counteract the conditions that allowed it to occur in the first place. To discover these conditions, Adorno analyzes the attitudes and behaviors of the persecutors. I will focus on three major features: blind identification with a collective, barbarization, and coldness. I begin by briefly outlining these features and Adorno’s s account of how education might counteract them, specifically by encouraging individuals to critically self-reflect, gain greater awareness of one’s social context, and be sensitive to others as unique individuals. I then introduce Mark Johnson’s account of imagination and argue that an imaginative education can make real inroads to Adorno’s education goals insofar as imagination promotes all of the features therein. Further, I move my argument out of the theoretical, and offer a concrete example of such imaginative education in the Oskar Schindler Factory. Ultimately, my aim for this paper is not only to offer a way to actualize Adorno’s post-Auschwitz education initiatives, but also suggest that such goals can extend beyond the Holocaust and assist in education post-conflict per se.

Richard Oxenberg Endicott College Bloodthink, Doublethink, and Socratic Dialectic: Critical Thinking and the Duplicitous Mind

“Crooked people deceive themselves in order to deceive others; in this way the world comes to ruin” (attributed to a medieval Confucianist) Let us examine a simple syllogism: All human beings have a right to liberty. All slaves are human beings. Therefore, all slaves have a right to liberty. Premise one is derived directly from the Declaration of Independence. Premise two states a demonstrable fact. The conclusion follows as a matter of logical necessity. The syllogism, as a

56 matter of elementary logic, is as simple in its logical form—indeed more simple—than 2 + 2 = 4. How is it, then, that a number of signatories to the Declaration of Independence failed to notice that their slave-ownership was wrong? In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell provides an explanation in the cognitive strategy he dubs –‘Doublethink’: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them. . . to forget whatever [is] necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it [is] needed, and then promptly to forget it again”—this is doublethink. Doublethink is a psycho-cognitive strategy that enables the duplicitous mind to conceal from itself its own duplicity. Doublethink provides the support for what I will call ‘bloodthink’. I take the phrase ‘bloodthink’ from a dialogue that took place between an American journalist and a young SA stormtrooper in Hitler’s Germany. When the journalist pointed out the logical inconsistencies in the stormtrooper’s anti-Semitism, the stormtrooper dismissed the appeal to logic: “Hitler,” he declared, “has taught us to think with our blood!” Bloodthink is a mode of cognition that willfully holds as true whatever appears to satisfy passion or appetite. In my paper I argue that bloodthink and doublethink are alive and well in our society today and, if anything, receiving support from the post-modern critique of objectivity and reason. The antidote to both, as Plato and Socrates understood, is a practice of critical reflection that challenges us to examine the incoherencies in our own and others’ views. The capacity for such critical reflection is an intellectual virtue that requires cultivation and nurture. My paper examines the psychological proclivity for bloodthink and doublethink, and argues that a robust program of Critical Thinking in the college curriculum, oriented specifically to identifying and addressing it, is crucial to the furtherance of a just society.

Max G. Parish Marquette University & University of Oklahoma Human Nature, the Normativity Objection and the Practical Reason Response: No Cigar Is there a human nature? If so, does it have normative authority? These are lynchpin questions in social theory. Aristotelian ethics answers textit{yes} to both questions, thereby becoming both a target and an inspiration for social and political philosophers. In this paper I consider Aristotelianism's stance on the second question. Many philosophers have argued that human nature is not normative. I call this the textit{normativity objection}. Micah Lott has recently defended the Practical Reason Response (PRR), the most powerful Aristotelian response to the normativity objection on offer. I argue that PRR fails. First, I develop an argument for the normativity objection. It avoids the Aristotelian responses given to previous critical arguments, and thus provides prima facie reason to believe

57 Distinctness, the thesis that judgments about human nature are conceptually distinct from authoritative judgments. Then I describe PRR. It begins with the claim that the normativity objection assumes we can reflectively step back from our human nature and question its authoritative relevance. But PRR claims this isn't possible on the Aristotelian's conception of human nature. For Aristotelians, to understand any life-form is to understand its non-defective, characteristic way of life. Arguably, the human life-form is characterized by the natural faculty of practical reason. So understanding the human life-form involves some grasp on the proper functioning of practical reason---which is to have some grasp on the sorts of fact that human beings ought to recognize as reasons. As Lott concludes, [R] ''what is naturally good in humans...is a life that is practically rational,'' where `practically rational' is taken in the authoritative sense. To grasp the former is to grasp the latter. I argue that R bears two interpretations. On the first, R asserts a conceptual identity between the concepts ''properly-functioning-human-practical-reason'' and ''practical rationality.'' On this interpretation, R saddles PRR with a dilemma between begging the question against the critic or equivocating. If PRR assumes R, then it begs the question, for R is essentially the negation of Distinctness. Since we already have prima facie reason to accept Distinctness, the Aristotelian cannot simply assume that Distinctness is false. On the other hand, if PRR is meant to be read as containing an argument that begins with judgments about human natural goodness and concludes with authoritative judgments, then it equivocates. For, as I show, the only way it can do this without falling back on the first horn is by shifting conceptual categories mid stride. According to the second interpretation, R claims that the concepts ''properly-functioninghuman-practical-reason'' and "practical rationality'' are not identical but coextensive. That is, it claims that some facts about human nature can constitute reasons, even if they do not entail them. I suggest this is plausible, but it undermines the basic strategy of PRR. For R, on this interpretation, does not prevent us from stepping back and asking whether properlyfunctioning-practical-reason really is authoritative, or whether normative authority comes from some other source. I conclude that PRR cannot save Aristotelianism from the normativity objection.

Miranda Pilipchuk Villanova University He Eats Me, He Eats Me Not: Violence Against Women and Animals, and the Construction of the Political Subject On the cover of its June 1978 issue, the pornographic magazine Hustler controversially depicted the lower half of a female body being processed through a meat grinder. The caption on the cover quotes Hustler founder Larry Flynt: ‘We will no longer hang up women like pieces of meat.’ Together, the Hustler cover image and Flynt’s words explicitly indicate that the magazine treats women in the same way that society treats animals: it dismembers and

58 consumes them. The women/animals association works largely through the power of the metaphor. Ecofeminist Carol Adams notes that sexual violence survivors often describe their assault in terms of being consumed. By evoking the language of meat eating, rape survivors employ an animal’s experience of being a food object as a way of understanding their own experience of sexual violence. The survivor’s experience is framed by a larger discourse of violence and consumption. For Adams, this association between meat eating and sexual violence also extends into the act of rape itself. Just as animals are speared with a fork, cut apart with a knife, and digested, so too are women restrained by the male body, entered against their will, and overtaken. The form might differ, but the eating of animals and the rape of women end up amounting to the same action: animals and women are objectified, and then violently consumed. I write this paper in direct response to such systems of violence. My purpose is twofold. The first is to examine the traditional association between women and animals, and how this association has been used to harm both women and animals. The second is to explore the possibility that the women/animals association could be used as a source of political resistance. Drawing on the work of Catriona Sandilands, I argue that the women/animals association challenges the traditionally autonomous political subject that is at the heart of contemporary democratic theory. Sandilands maintains that political life presupposes the existence of the subject. It is the subject, and only the subject who is able to enter into community with other subjects, and create and obey the laws necessary to establish a government. Objects do not have this capacity. As long as animals, women, and nature, are seen as objects and not as subjects they will be unable to assume a meaningful place in political systems. Sandilands calls into question the traditional philosophical conception of the independent, isolated subject, arguing instead that subjects gain their subjectivity precisely through relation to others. By demonstrating the essentially interrelational nature of subjectivities, the women/animals association calls for a rethinking of the traditional political subject, and a reformation of current political systems. Yes

Jesus Ramirez University of South Florida Peripheral-Being-in-the-World and Epistemological Resistance The aim of this paper is to explain a possible ontology of marginalized and peripheral communities where epistemological resistances are created out of an existence that is founded upon conflict. I first discuss the idea of vorsein or peripheral-Being-in-the-world, wherein I use Martin Heidegger’s notion of Dasein from his Being and Time. I evaluate Dasein as if it were from a position of marginalization and refashion it as Vorsein. I examine what it would it would like for the periphery to have an ontological existence where certain opportunities for knowledge about the periphery would not be ready-to-hand. I show how this causes a breakdown in which people from marginalized communities are constantly faced with their identity being present-at-hand rather than ready-to-hand. After establishing the periphery as its own ontological category, I discuss the epistemological output of speaking from the margins. I discuss Foucault’s account of power and resistance to explain how power is dispersed through a set of relations within a network that is constructed to have particular points of marginalization and dominance. This is where epistemological resistance is created,

59 wherein individuals who are born from a critical position of Being in the periphery attempt to push back against dominant relations of power by protesting and/or taking classes that speak to their standpoint of strife. I provide personal and contemporary examples of students marching against the elimination of Mexican-American studies programs in Arizona’s school system. This is used to elucidate how the lack of ready-to-handness of the opportunities to learn about one’s cultural heritage can push individuals into the mode of epistemological resistance where in peripheral-Being-in-the-world comes to light. I conclude with a look at the discipline of philosophy itself and how fields such as Latin American Philosophy can be considered as creations built as a large form of epistemological resistance from the standpoint of an academic periphery.

David Matthew Reese Georgetown University Regulation of Bodies as Gendered Nationalistic Ideology: Physically Wounded Veterans as Political Props In this paper I examine the way that physically-wounded U.S. veterans receiving the focus of a public, patriotic, hero-worshipping discourse, while the psychologically and emotionally wounded are left hidden and unspoken of, perpetuates and strengthens a notion of masculinity that imagines the body as simply a tool of the mind and a body wounded in the service of the nation as a mark of honor, while an injured mind in the same service remains a disgrace and a source of shame. I argue that Cory Remsburg, a 10-time deployed Army Ranger severely wounded in Afghanistan, being held up and applauded in the 2014 State of the Union Address (and not 22 empty chairs to represent the daily veteran suicide count, for example) does disciplining work in terms of defining acceptable, normative veteran identities and bodies as those that may be physically wounded, but are mentally strong, regulating an appropriate patriotic and nationalistic sacrificial masculinity that views physical injury as the ultimate display of devotion to the country, and subjectifying future veterans by demonstrating those types of veteran bodies that are held up and applauded. Ultimately, this disciplinary process moves the focus away from individual heroic actions in combat and war, and instead places a wide-spread, abstract focus on the heroic choice to join the all-volunteer military force, which reduces the vast and varied experiences of all veterans to one standard, abstract, disconnected hero identity with the result being the wider populations’ mere attempt to ‘thank veterans for their service,’ rather than more deeply engage with actual veteran’s issues. In my paper, I use the works of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Mary Parker Follett as the philosophical support for my investigation.

James Edward Roper Michigan State University The Corporatized University as a Hostile Educational Environment Sexual harassment can consist either of inappropriate “quid pro quo” proposals or creation of “hostile working environments”—settings where sexual exploitation is likely. The idea of a “hostile environment” has been extended to cover “learning environments,” including

60 college/university settings. This paper generalizes that notion to cover “hostile educational environments.” Such settings cover not just students but also university faculties and administrations. My specific focus is on how what I call “the corporatization of (many) American universities” turns these venues into “hostile educational environments”—settings conducive to exploitation and abuse. I begin with an analysis of what, in general, “corporatization” is; I then apply this to what is happening in many major universities. I will pay particular attention to the fact that large universities are (legally) corporations, and how that fact has come to affect the way many universities are “governed”—especially during periods of financial stress. I analyze how the various constituencies of the university are described and regarded. In particular, I examine (1) the role of the administration and how it interacts with the faculty, who are often treated as “employees,” (2) the way students are now regularly regarded as “customers,” and (3) the emphasis placed on “outside grants” as an additional funding source. Through both examples and general considerations, I show how this “corporatized university” is hostile to all of its various university constituencies—and, indeed, to the very idea of a university. I propose an alternative way of thinking about the university and its constituencies. Rather than thinking about universities as “business corporations” with managers, workers, and customers, linked together solely by a network of “contracts,” I propose we think of them as also connected by an overarching “educational covenant” between administration, faculty, and students. I explain in detail what I mean by this and how covenants differ from contracts. Obviously, the university exists in a world in which there are contracts and a corporate legal system; but that does not mean that the university should set about reimagining itself on the model of a large commercial corporation, which, sadly, is what seems to be happening. I show in some detail how a university can exist in the corporatized world we have created. Ultimately, my purpose is to differentiate the corporatized university, which I show is a “hostile educational environment” from the university based on a covenant between teachers, students, and administrators which I argue delineates an educational environment that is healthy and positive and embodies the moral values associated with social justice in higher education.

Matt Ross Independent Scholar Leveling Up Education: A Constructive Critique of Gamification As we push further into the 21st Century, technology grabs more of the spotlight in discussions of education and educational methodologies. Certain aspects, like digitizing resources or offering online courses, can help reach new audiences, particularly those without the funds for high priced text books or the hours for traditional classroom. Another major change to education that is highly influenced by advancements in the tech industry is the gamification of education. Gamification incorporates aspects of digital game play by focusing on personal ‘achievements. Go to ten classes in a row? Earn some points. Get passing grades

61 on the harassment test? Get a medal. Gamification is currently gaining popularity in corporate education settings and beginning to seep into traditional classrooms. In this paper, I will investigate the value of gamification in education, focusing primarily on its role in the corporate setting since that is where it is the most prevalent. I argue that the major issue with this new trend is that the motivation and theory behind it is not fulfilled in its practice. Gamification is supposed to present what is called a “disruptive” education because of its ability to disrupt the status quo and encourage new ways of learning and engagement for new learners (primarily women and peoples of color). In particular, the features of a gamified education are supposed to be empowered students, challenge conventions, and improve retention. I argue that despite these claims, in practice such disruption does not occur. Rather than change anything, gamification as it is currently implemented, merely reinforces ossified ideology and codifies existing power structures. Gamification, then, instead of being the face of change in education needs a serious investigation and improvement. My project is not merely a critique, rather, I offer potential solutions to utilize the best parts of gamification in order to actually meet its ‘disruptive’ potential. Ultimately, this discussion is an important one to have early on as traditional educational begins to investigate the potential for incorporating gamification.

Gina Schouten Illinois State University Philosophy in Schools: Can Early Exposure Help Solve Philosophy's Gender Problem? Though formal instruction in philosophy at the pre-collegiate level remains relatively uncommon, the past few decades have witnessed steadily increasing interest in exploring the prospects for engaging younger students in philosophical inquiry. In this project, I will explore a new reason in favor of pre-collegiate philosophy: It can help narrow the persistent gender disparity within the discipline. My plan is to catalogue some of the most widely-endorsed explanations for the underrepresentation of women in philosophy and argue that, on each hypothesized explanation, pre-collegiate philosophy instruction could help improve our discipline’s gender balance. Explanations I plan to consider include stereotype threat, gendered philosophical intuitions, inhospitable disciplinary environment, lack of same-sex role models for women students in philosophy, and conflicting “schemas” for philosophy and femininity. I will argue that, insofar as some combination of these hypothesized explanations accounts for some portion of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, those of us concerned to make things better have reason to participate in and promote efforts to share philosophy with younger students. Some examples will illustrate what I hope to show. By expanding students’ exposure to philosophy in primary and secondary schools, we can enlarge the pool of samesex philosophy instructors to which female students are exposed; we can promote more constructive, affirming, and gender-neutral schemas for philosophy; and we can affirm female students’ belongingness within the domain of academic philosophy thereby providing an “inoculation” against the various anxieties they might later feel in college-level philosophy

62 courses. In all of these ways, we can generate a mutually-reinforcing, virtuous circle of progress: More women entering introductory college courses equipped with more resources to help them overcome the challenges they confront will result in a higher proportion of women persisting through the disciplinary ranks. More women progressing through the disciplinary ranks will further increase the number of same-sex experts teaching women students; it will further the goal of gender-neutralizing schemas for philosophy; it will further affirm women’s belongingness within our discipline; and, in all likelihood, it will improve our disciplinary climate to make it not only more hospitable to women, but more conducive to philosophical thinking and teaching generally. Two points of clarification: First, my goal is to draw attention to philosophy in schools as a project that has not yet been considered as a tool for improving our gender balance, and argue that it might plausibly be a very powerful tool for that purpose. I do not endorse it to the exclusion of other tools available to us—most notably, tools that will help us offset our implicit biases and end outright discrimination, abuse, and harassment. Second, I do not intend positively to endorse the candidate explanations of the gender imbalance I consider, or to claim that they exhaust the plausible explanations for that phenomenon. Rather, I suggest that insofar as any of the prima facie plausible candidates considered here accounts for some portion of the gender imbalance, we have reason to consider philosophy in schools as a promising way of mitigating that imbalance.

Lisa H. Schwartzman Michigan State University Ideal Theory, Oppression, and the Aims of Political Theorizing In the wake of Charles Mills’ groundbreaking critique of social contract theory, a number of philosophers have critically examined the methodology employed by liberal political theorists such as Rawls. Drawing on O’Neill’s distinction between abstraction and idealization, Mills argues that while some degree of abstraction is necessary for all theorizing, “idealizations” that employ untrue assumptions are pernicious. The ideal of persons as self-interested individuals with equal ability to articulate and advocate for their preferences, for instance, can function ideologically when it is employed in a world characterized by racism, classism, and sexist inequality. Moreover, the focus on abstract ideals can turn attention away from the social and political problems present in actual societies. The resultant philosophical theories may therefore be “useless” or unable to guide action. My paper returns to these debates about ideal theory through looking at recent work by a variety of authors who raise questions about the value of ideal theory (such as Stemplowska 2008, Valentini 2009 and 2012, and Erman and Moller 2013). I focus in particular on the charge that ideal theory is “useless” because it involves false idealizing assumptions and therefore cannot be applied under actual, non-ideal conditions. Ultimately, I argue that this charge is misleading for a number of reasons: All theories involve assumptions, and it is the ideological nature of the falsehood that is most problematic (not the mere fact that the assumption is untrue of some agents). Moreover, ideal theories that are constructed from

63 positions of privilege within a hierarchical structure are likely to embody various forms of oppression. Thus, they may be worse than “useless” if they further entrench oppressive structures. I conclude by considering what the goals of political theorizing are, and I draw on Lisa Tessman’s recent work in moral theory. Following Tessman, I argue that being able to guide action is only one goal of normative theory, and that feminist and anti-racist philosophers must also look to construct theories that embody visions of non-oppressive futures.

Ezgi Sertler Michigan State University Exploring Possibilities: Epistemic Responsibility and Education This paper is an effort to begin to understand the relationship between epistemic responsibility and education. In particular, it explores how José Medina’s discussion of epistemic responsibility in The Epistemology of Resistance (2013) could be put into dialogue with the works collected in Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education (2011) regarding building epistemically just and responsible pedagogical environments and practices. What we begin to see through this dialogue, I claim, is first how Medina’s discussion of epistemic responsibility might be helpful in tackling problems related to the production of ignorance in education. Second, I argue that the dialogue forces us to think about how important the imagination of structural possibilities is for transformative educative practices. Erik Malewski and Nathalia Jaramillo, in Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education, state that to question ignorance in education is actually to underline “the active production of unknowing in order to keep in motion “the way things are” instead of thinking about “the ways things could be” (2). This active production of unknowing operates through gaps, omissions, and exclusions at the level of institutions, curricula, and teacher-student relationships, where systemic injustices are reproduced and reinforced (5). If one wants to decelerate the active production of such unknowing, one faces the problem of how and to what extent one can tackle these exclusions (given that knowledge is attained always in conjunction with complex forms of ignorance). That is where I want to turn to Medina and claim that his discussions of openness, vigilance, and epistemic friction in creating epistemically responsible communities might pave the way for educative practices that could pluralize social imagination in order to spell out “the ways things could be.” However, this makes us further question what is really meant by “the ways things could be” and what kinds of possibilities it involves. Connecting Medina’s discussion of epistemic responsibility with the discussion of ignorance in education, I argue, shows us that “the ways things could be” represents an imaginative openness that is structural. This would be an imaginative openness highlighting the inadequacy of our intellectual communities to teach to question and to entertain different possibilities concerning social structures. An imaginative openness not only towards the inclusion of previously ignored subjects, subjectivities, and issues but also towards the possibility of re-shaped social structures which could limit the active production of unknowing that causes epistemic injustice.

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Colena Sesanker University of Connecticut The Tao of Resistance: Humanity and the Education of the Emotions. Wittgenstein’s later sceptical musings have quite straightforward implications for the way we conceptualize what language and philosophy can and cannot do. While this may be old news, looking at Wittgenstein’s arguments as applied to certain social issues can drive home the true depth of the problem. George Yancy’s elevator scenario, for example, which begins his book “Black Bodies White Gazes” describes a situation which may seem hopeless when such sceptical considerations are taken into account. To the extent that Wittgenstein provides a solution to the problem of how we come to mean what we say, it would seem that our expressive ability is severely constrained by whatever our prevailing language game happens to be. For those in oppressive circumstances, it paints a picture of oppression as constraining the oppressed not only externally, but also as internally dictating what they can be said to think, feel and know. Oppressive forces seem to reach right in, affecting what can be meaningfully said even to one’s self. This is testimonial injustice of the deepest kind. This paper discusses oppressive situations on a Wittgensteinian construal- about as dismal a portrayal of agency in such scenarios as can be provided. It then presents for consideration various creative acts of protest seen across the world in recent years as examples of situations in which usurping certain sorts of language use created the possibility of new meanings. In the current context of increased visibility of violence against black bodies, it is as important as ever to explore the possibility of creating common ground for significant exchanges; of changing the meaning of such bodies and their possibilities for engaging in meaningful resistance. Even when saddled with skeptical concerns and radical externalism about meaning, there is something to be said about agency in the face of oppression. What is needed is not evidence of the humanity of the oppressed. Such evidence is never available. Rather than an education of the mind, what is needed is what Joel Kupperman refers to as the “education of the emotions” as promoted in Taoist texts such as Chuang Tzu’s Inner Chapters, and an emphasis on spontaneity and creativity.

Devora Shapiro Southern Oregon University Education and the Failure of "Objectivity" as an Epistemic Ideal In this paper I critically engage various commitments to “objectivity.” Rather than define “objectivity”—there have been numerous definitions, concepts, referents of this term—I identify what “objectivity,” as a normative concept, "is doing". It is clear, as I will discuss, that objectivity has a sordid history; it has been used to demean, and silence, it has been used as a

65 masque to obscure the workings of power. But it has also been developed as an ideal with apparently noble goals in mind: democracy, equality, and transparency. I will assert (the fairly uncontentious view) that objectivity, as traditionally conceived, fails. That is, that the ideal of the detached, all-seeing, ahistorical, disembodied, unbiased, and unemotional view or agent does not exist. I will also assert, as a slightly more controversial claim, that attempts to salvage, re-imagine, or resuscitate objectivity, are misguided. They are misguided not because the approaches and methods they suggest to do the work of objectivity are ill-conceived, but rather because the work they conceive a revived objectivity might do can never be done by “objectivity.” I illustrate the force of this claim through the example of “standardized testing,” as it is promoted and used in contemporary US education. I limit my focus here to just one account of the value that a reimagined objectivity might provide: that of objectivity as trustworthiness forwarded by Naomi Scheman. I choose this one account because trusting, and trustworthiness, seem to be me to be essential to any sustainable and just epistemology. What I ultimately aim to argue for—the larger project—is that if we are to make progress towards an epistemically just society that values the kinds of epistemic practices forwarded by feminist and social philosophers, we will need to go “all in” for a paradigm that can make sense of the concepts and concerns that fuel such an epistemology. In doing so, ultimately, we will need to accept that the traditional paradigm will need to be discarded, and with it, “objectivity.”•

Matthew R. Silliman Learning as Learning How to Feel

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Conventional wisdom, which by and large supports recent brutalizing reforms to public education, places content at the center of learning. To learn, on this view, is to acquire some identifiable knowledge, skill, ability, or cultural capital. If we accept this largely unstated background assumption, then the logic of regimentation, high-stakes testing, etc. is nearly irresistible, and we empower the bureaucratic creep of an audit culture, even as we bemoan its advance. It should come as no surprise that resistance has been somewhat muted and fragmented, at least so far, because of the difficulty of challenging such a deeply ingrained image of what it is to learn. This paper will challenge the assumption that we should allow the acquisition of content to dominate our concept of learning. I will argue, rather, that while some specific content or other may frequently be a legitimate educational aim, the learning process as such is at root emotional. We acquire specific content only after developing a particular sensibility in relation to it, often mediated by an interpersonal connection with a teacher. We learn by learning how to feel, and in the process whatever content is important or useful becomes accessible to us. Several interesting things follow, if we take emotional development rather than content as the basis of learning. First, it becomes clear why didactic methods are ineffective, since emotional

66 growth is generally slow, nonlinear, and fostered most efficiently not through regimentation but through affective relationships—modeling, subtle encouragement, inspiration. Second, with this understanding we can resolve a central paradox of education: how to foster learners’ autonomy while telling them what to think and do, since specific content acquisition becomes something students choose, from a standpoint of alert emotional maturity, rather than something arbitrarily thrust upon them. Most importantly, if we can credibly articulate this view of learning and defend it against some challenges and caricatures, we will be in a much stronger position to oppose the reductive and corporatized—and deeply unjust—direction of so-called educational reform.

Andrew F. Smith The Impossibility of Vegetarianism

Drexel University

In this paper, I will give an overview of why it is not possible to develop a moral defense of vegetarianism. It comes down to this: one cannot be a vegetarian. In order to make my case, I proceed in three steps. First, I argue that the most common moral defense of vegetarianism--the sentientist argument--fails according to its own standards. Sentientists contend that sentience confers moral standing. Beings with moral standing must not be eaten. I provide clear scientific evidence that plants are sentient. This creates a clear problem for sentientists, who condone eating plants on the assumption that they are not sentient so lack moral standing. In response, I offer what I call an expansionary moral defense of vegetarianism, according to which it is permissible to kill and eat plants so long as one exhibits due care and respect for them when growing and harvesting. This rules out an array of techniques employed in conventional farming. Second, I argue that expansionary sentientism itself proves unsatisfying. It maintains vestiges of sentientism that can lead expansionary sentientists to privilege beings with human-like capacities. So the expansionary sentientist may likewise fail to take adequate consideration of the needs and interests of other-than-human beings. I draw heavily on the work of Val Plumwood and theorists of what has come to be known as the "new animism" to develop my argument. On this second attempt to develop a solid moral defense of vegetarianism, I argue that context is key. The needs and interests of the ecosystems in which we derive our food should govern how we eat. Numerous locations, most notably urban locales (under the right circumstances), are well-suited to vegetarianism. Other locations--the plains, forests--are not. And seeking to clear them for agriculture, as is generally necessary for vegetarianism, can be incredible destructive to the land base and all who live on and in it.

Finally, I find the contextual defense wanting as well. The reason for this is simple. If we are what we eat, we are also what our food eats. Plants eat plant and animal matter. They feed on minerals derived from the soil, which is constituted by decayed plant and animal matter So the cycle of life and death is a closed loop. There is no top or bottom to the food chain. As such, the distinction between plant and animal matter breaks down--as does the distinction between

67 vegetarianism and omnivorism. No distinction, no vegetarianism. No vegetarianism, no possibility for a moral defense of it. It should go without saying that my considerations are anything but a defense of the status quo. What Plumwood calls "flesh farms" are incredibly harmful to individual lives and ecologically. The same can be said of "flesh fields," which are the mutant products of conventional agriculture. So it is possible to defend a very different way of relating to our food.

Roxanne K. Smith Inventing Virtue Metaphysics

University of Illinois Springfield

Alice theorizes that race is socially constructed. Betty denies the existence of race alongside her rejection of all non-fundamental entities. Charlie construes race as a biological kind. Arguably, Alice is a better theorizer of the world than Betty or Charlie. This is a normative claim about the content of metaphysical outlooks. Thus, it is possible to be a better or worse theorizer of the world—it is possible to be a more or less virtuous metaphysical agent. Don sees a gun where there’s a cell phone. Emma contends that affirmative action is wrong. Farrah contends that in principle only females can be women. Each has made an error. Don has made an epistemic error, Emma has made an ethical error, and Farrah has made a metaphysical error. Thus, the task of understanding virtuous metaphysical agency is not a task (solely) for virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Philosophy needs the research area of virtue metaphysics. In the abstract, virtue metaphysics takes its subject matter to be the character traits/dispositions of excellent theorizers with respect to a particular normative understanding of the goods/goals of metaphysics. When we flesh out the goals and virtues, we get something that matters to our lives. Metaphysical agents are worldmakers—theorizing can maintain the status quo or can change the world, even to the point of bringing new kinds of things into existence. Metaphysical agents shape in important ways the space of possibilities now and in the future. Thus, we ought to be concerned with their virtues.

Trevor William Smith Marquette University Educating the Educators: What activists can teach academics Work in political, moral, and social philosophy often establishes, rightly, the overwhelming need for actions in response to instances of injustice or to combat systematic structures of oppression. Countless theorists have rigorously defended the need for such struggles but have often failed to provide insights into the specifics of determining how such actions, campaigns, or struggles should take shape. What is often missing from academic works on injustice and the need for resistance to oppression is a mechanism for understanding and generating practical and implementable actions to be used by the resistance fighter. Fortunately, such mechanisms exist and are currently being used by revolutionary organizers and activists outside academia. It is these mechanisms which need to be bought into academic discussions

68 of injustice and resistance, and in this way the insights of real-life organizers can be seen working to “educate the educators” and help propel academic works beyond merely gesturing towards practical implementation and into the determination of lived political struggle. This paper works to bring one such mechanism from the practical world of organizing into the academic conversations surrounding injustice and resistance. Beginning with terminological and taxological distinctions, which enable one to have a grounded understanding of basic organizing concepts like ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics,’ this work outlines a cohesive and dynamic model which can provide the specifics of action determination. This model can be deployed to determine the measures needed for agents to engage in forms of resistance as called for by moral, political, and social philosophy. After outlining (and endorsing) one such model, this paper argues that such a mechanism offers substantial benefits to any academic account of injustice or oppression.

Rein Staal William Jewell College Human Resource and Citizen: The Paradox of Educational Assessment In the national conversation over education policy, most major political actors have been beguiled by the lure of the quantitative assessment of education. The accompanying managerial, techno-bureaucratic mindset reverberates throughout the outcomes-based assessment mechanisms alternately espoused by contending schools of educational reform, from Goals 2000 and NCLB through high-stakes value-added assessment of teachers to the current administration's pursuit of PIRS (Postsecondary Institution Rating System). Recoiling from the reform movements focused on quantifiable education outcomes, champions of the public education establishment focus on measurable systemic inputs such as financing, class size, and curricular guidelines. At each stage, as the assessment of education becomes more meticulous and precise, the purpose of education as a public good, the person's development as a human being and citizen, becomes lost from view. Most parties to the public debate on education policy place a central focus on the development of the person as human resource, with an accompanying emphasis on testing, uniform curriculum, and vocational skills,. This managerial orientation actually flies in the face of the original liberal or free-market explorations of education as a public good. Those would include Mill's original proto-voucher program as set out in On Liberty, including his call for a plurality of kinds of education, as well as Friedman's original argument for a voucher program, which characterizes general education for citizenship, and not vocational education, as the public good in education. Seen in this light, the assessment phenomenon looms as a command-and-control mechanism inimical to the education of free citizens and ethical beings. (Mill's own underdeveloped reflections on testing point to potential pitfalls.) The bureaucratic imperatives of comparability and quantification promote a hollowed-out version of education. These reflections in turn buttress the argument for general education for citizenship that could be made on republican grounds. The possible convergence of liberal and republican reasoning can be seen in those who advocate educational pluralism ("choice") as a means of promoting

69 civic equality. The right direction for education reform lies in exploring the possibilities for educational experiences that cannot be reduced to a uniform method of assessment.

Jordan Stewart-Rozema Emory University Curiosity's Potential in Education for Social Justice: Freire, Dewey, and Flexible Epistemology

Many have criticized Paulo Freire over the last two decades from the perspective of postmodern and post-structural theories of difference, context, and privilege (Weiler 1991, Jackson 2007, Bowers 2005). These criticisms do not stem from direct opposition to Freire’s core belief in the impermissibility of oppression and the desire for a liberatory pedagogy, but rather from a more nuanced idea of social justice developed by Young (1990) and others that recognizes the multi-dimensional and contextual nature of justice. Recently, Freire’s pedagogical concept of curiosity was a specific target of such criticism in Tyson Lewis’ “Teaching with Pensive Images: Rethinking Curiosity in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (2012). Lewis claims that Freire’s curiosity is problematic due to its supposed complicity in perpetuating unequal epistemological standpoints and its alleged role as a discriminatory rather than generative agent. He instead proposes to reframe Friere’s curiosity in terms of an aesthetic curiosity that disrupts and redistributes the plane of the visible in a non-hierarchical fashion. Against Lewis’ recontextualization of Freire’s curiosity into aesthetic curiosity, I argue that Freire’s epistemological curiosity and its ontological basis are not inherently objectionable if viewed in conjunction with the related Deweyan concepts of interest and growth. Disregarding an epistemological framework for conceptualizing curiosity may avoid the totalizing, modernist connotations of “knowing” so anathema to post-modern thought, but it ignores the context-specific and practical ways in which knowing and knowledge can still operate as the most effective and appropriate modes for curiosity and liberation. It also disregards a broader and more inclusive definition of knowledge that can be useful in exploring curiosity as a means toward liberation. I argue that Dewey’s idea of interest gives us the resources for dealing with at least two curiosity-related problems tied to practical and context-specific settings in which knowing, and thus Freire’s epistemological curiosity, are still relevant: First, Deweyan interest provides a way to navigate the problem of sociallyconstituted or produced subjects whose superficial “interests” do not align with liberatory aims and even serve to uphold hegemonic discourses or practices. Second, as Mark Jonas has pointed out (2011), Deweyan interest can be encouraged even amongst the conflicting educational demands of, on the one hand, increasing class sizes and pressures of standardized achievement assessments, and, on the other, the growing demand to teach “to the students” and “maximize student engagement” by drawing on their individual interests.

Krassimir Stojanov Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany Inequalities and Educational Justice

70 The goal of this paper is to identify and justify a normative principle that allows for an identification of inequalities incompatible with educational justice. To reach that goal, three alternative versions of egalitarianism are discussed: luck egalitarianism, threshold (minimalist) egalitarianism, and respect egalitarianism. Respect egalitarianism can be closely linked to the model of epistemic justice, which was recently the subject of intensive, far reaching discussions in the field of philosophy of education. This paper argues that the approaches of both luck egalitarianism and threshold egalitarianism are inadequate to satisfy the aim of this paper. Luck egalitarianism entails the “bottomless pit problem” that seems to be conceptually and politically unsolvable. Additionally, luck egalitarians tend to interpret education as a positional, distributive good whose primary value is extrinsic. This stance ignores that education is foremost concerned with the growth of knowledge—a non-positional good whose worth is primarily intrinsic. On the other hand, threshold egalitarians do not offer a conceptual means of discriminating between just and unjust educational inequalities that lie above the capability threshold required by individuals to participate in the political life of society and/or to live a life of dignity. The approach of respect egalitarianism avoids these shortcomings. According to this approach, the most crucial form of educational injustice is treating select groups of students with disrespect by disregarding their beliefs, experiences, ideals, and achievements, as well as their knowledge-ability. Educational injustice appears both as a lack of empathy and cognitive respect toward students. To overcome educational injustice so understood, educational institutions should design and implement forms of teaching that equally include the beliefs and experiences of all students. Teachers should use these beliefs and experiences as a point of departure for addressing academic classroom content. Social, economic, and knowledge inequalities between students would no longer be an issue of educational injustice if principles of respect in formal education were fully implemented.

Velimir Stojkovski Marquette University The Concept of "Bildung" and Contemporary Education The guiding notion of what it means to educate a person in 18th and 19th century German thought revolved around the concept of “Bildung,” which has the multiple meanings of selfcultivation, learning, education, and culture. The underlying driving force of the concept is that education is not a process of memorizing facts or a mastering of certain techniques, but rather a method of developing oneself morally and spiritually. Given the realities of the current economic and political climate, the concept seems somewhat antiquated. Part of what every educator has to contend with in the 21st century is that education has become largely instrumentalized—one goes to school in order to build a career. I believe that it is precisely for this reason that we have to take a fresh look at the concept of Bildung from a contemporary perspective. For Hegel and the romantic thinkers, self-cultivation is the central way in which one overcomes alienation and achieves political freedom. Approaching the issue from the standpoint of philosophy and art respectively, Hegel and the romantics argue that the person

71 who has not undergone the process of Bildung is perpetually caught up in one’s selfish interests, thus never realizing that one’s own interests are always intertwined with those of everyone else and the larger social good in a strong manner, which in turn means that we become socially and politically alienated. The only way to overcome this alienation is to selfcultivate. This, however, does not and cannot entail that cultivation is achieved in isolation. Rather, it is always done in social, intersubjective context. As such, Bildung is the ongoing effort by both students and teachers to develop oneself into a full individual, so when it takes place in the classroom it involves a more collaborative model of learning. Overall, by relying on the work of Hegel, Gadamer, and the German romantics, I will explore how to employ the notion of Bildung in the classroom as a possible way of guiding the teaching of philosophy, as well as other disciplines, and as a means of addressing social and political injustice.

Jennifer Szende

Centre de Recherche en Ethique, University of Montreal

Global Justice, Environmental Justice: Bridging the Gap The environmental justice literature starts from the observation of a correlation between socio-economic marginalization and environmental marginalization. The sadly familiar correlation between social marginalization and alienation from pristine environments is made all the worse by another correlation between social marginalization and exposure to toxicity. Until recently, the correlations examined within the environmental justice literature have, for the most part, focused on marginalization within a society, rather than global marginalization. Yet a global correlation is nonetheless evident, and should be of deep concern to the environmental justice movement. In particular, the impact of environmental regulations in the global ‘North’ are felt most acutely in the global ‘South’, especially in industrializing nations with few environmental protections. The environmental justice movement increasingly aims to explore the correlations between global socio-economic marginalization and global environmental marginalization, and, to that end, this paper explores how an established global justice methodology can contribute. Much of the environmental justice literature departs from philosophical discussions of justice prior to the emergence of certain global justice and cosmopolitan insights into justice. One such insight is the focus on the global basic structure as contributing to institutional injustices. Pogge (2002) demonstrates how international institutions can perpetuate existing injustice, but how these same institutions serve to distribute responsibility. Both Pogge (2002) and Beitz (2009) suggest mechanisms whereby the coercive components of international institutions can be leveraged to enforce and implement better human rights practices. Both incentive mechanisms—such as bilateral trade treaties and membership in multilateral organizations— and disincentive mechanisms—such as humanitarian intervention and trade embargoes—can be leveraged to enforce justice norms even where formal international agreement regarding human rights are not in place.

72 This institutional attributes responsibility for human rights and human rights failures to the apparatus of the state. In cases of human rights failures or violations, this attribution opens the door to human rights enforcement through international actions that target the state or international institutions, even if only on a bilateral basis. By applying these justice insights, the environmental justice movement can learn from global justice debates and literature. An institutional focus suggests that both state and suprastate institutions can hold each other responsible for environmental failures, even where international treaties and agreements are not in place. Although Kyoto and other formal environmental institutions have failed because of lack of enforcement, a focus on bilateral state actions suggests a mechanism for moving forward in holding states responsible for their contribution to international environmental injustice. This paper brings the global justice insight of institutionalism to bear on the question of environmental justice.

Kyle Thomsen Saint Francis University Informal Discourse and Student Anonymity: Yik-Yak’ s Role in the University Public Sphere

Anonymity in student feedback, at the college level, is most often associated with student evaluations. The anonymous nature of these evaluations allows students, in theory, to honestly critique problems within a course without fear of reprisal from a frustrated professor. In the best of circumstances, this feedback serves as a guiding tool. Students are able to communicate freely, and a professor is able to adjust the course in ways which best meet students’ needs. A parallel exists between the evaluation/adjustment dynamic and the Habermasian informal/formal discursive dynamic. In both cases, the informal/evaluation component aims at directing the formal/adjustment component. Also, in both cases the occasional need to withhold the identity of the informal participant/evaluator allows us to confront imperfect discursive scenarios where authority figures can utilize coercive tactics to silent dissent and criticism. Ideally this system is supposed to provide an outlet for students, a place where they can say “no” and attempt to take some constructive control of the educational process. The rise of services such as Rate My Professor and, more recently, Yik-Yak have presented challenges to this anonymity model as a tool for educational progress. The purpose of this presentation is to examine services such as Yik-Yak and Rate My Professor in an effort to uncover their informal discursive character, or lack thereof. While it is not justified to speak in monolithic terms regarding these services, a disturbing trend has emerged as a result of the anonymity they provide. Unconnected from a clear progress-function, these platforms serve as a means to attack faculty and other students in a potentially unintentional effort to undermine educational justice. While it is true that informal discourses often come from a place of negativity, that negativity is aimed at positive change. Yik-Yak and similar

73 services do not serve this purpose. In fact, they often undermine discourse through a variety of coercive and marginalizing tactics. The effects of anonymous attacks can be profound, particularly when they are complemented by pre-existing systems of oppression. In the end, the role of services such as Yik-Yak seems to be a subversive one. However, these subversive characteristics can be neutralized by using anonymous communication resources as an authentic informal discursive forum. This fact serves as a call to action for faculty to not merely dismiss the services, but to attempt to leverage them as constructive tools of social and educational justice.

Theresa Tobin Marquette University Spiritual Violence and Gender Based Oppression In this paper I explore links between spiritual violence and the oppression of women and LGBT persons. To be oppressed means, among other things, that one’s freedom is significantly diminished in a systematic way (not accidental or incidental) on the basis of one’s membership in a social group. In her well-known essay on the subject, Iris Marion Young suggests that violence is one of five markers or“faces” of oppression. Oppression sets up structural barriers to important material and psychological goods and is often maintained through violence or the threat of violence. Young does not elaborate this face of oppression, but she implies that physical and perhaps psychological violence are what she has in mind as the primary kinds of violence to which oppressed social groups are vulnerable. I argue that spiritual violence is another mode of violence to which oppressed social groups are often vulnerable. Spiritual violence is violence in the sense of violation of persons. It is distinctively spiritual in terms of both its means—religious texts, rituals, and symbols, for example—and in terms of its primary target—a person’ s spiritual identity. Spiritual violence often leads a person to cultivate a harmful, even abusive, relationship with the divine and in extreme cases irreparably damages a person’s ability to pursue spiritual life altogether. In this paper, I argue that spiritual violence is linked with oppression not only because it contributes to the establishment and maintenance of social norms that support the subordination of certain populations, but also because it systematically places members of certain social groups at risk of developing an unhealthy spiritual life and thereby impedes their access to the good of healthy spirituality. That is, by supporting the spiritual subordination of certain populations, spiritual violence maintains structural barriers to the pursuit of spiritual goods, in particular a healthy spiritual identity. I focus my analysis on spiritual violence perpetrated against Christian women and LGBT Christians by their own faith traditions. Through this analysis I hope to foreground an under-theorized way that religion has been a powerful force in gender-based oppressions without dismissing the importance of faith and spirituality for many women and LGBT persons.

74 Ernesto Rosen Velasquez University of Dayton The Traditionalists and Challengers-to-Traditionalists Positions in Philosophy of Education

This paper thinks through John Searle’s article, “Traditionalists and Their Challengers” as a way of getting clearer on how the education crisis can get framed in the philosophy of education. In the piece Searle makes a distinction between two positions he identifies as those who defend traditional liberal arts curriculum and those who are fundamentally dissatisfied with it and propose that it be replaced with multiculturalism. He identifies the former as traditionalists and the latter as challengers-to-traditionalists. Traditionalists argue that students should learn the Western European intellectual tradition. Challengers-totraditionalist, for Searle, underscore the problem of underrepresentation and as a remedy to this argue for a more inclusive canon. Searle acknowledges the underrepresentation problem and imagines the traditionalist should just accept this as a valid criticism and amend the canon accordingly by including marginalized authors. This reform is consistent with the traditionalist view which, for Searle, recognizes that part of the value of higher education consists in its enabling us to see our own civilization and mode of sensibility as one possible life form among others. So what is left to argue about? The challenger-to-traditionalist does not accept the reform offered by the traditionalist for various reasons outlined by Searle. Part of the aim of the paper is to show that when we attend to some philosophers working in critical pedagogy who can be identified as challengers-to-traditionalist we find that the reasons the reform mentioned by Searle are not accepted are not for the reasons he mentions. In fact some challenger-to-traditionalist positions would not accept the views Searle attributes to them. Instead some of them reject the reform for independent reasons. More broadly, this paper critically evaluates both positions in order to get a clearer handle on how each position views the education crisis and tries to remedy it. More specifically, consideration is given to whether the seven assumptions he identifies with the challenger-to-traditionalist position apply to the works of some theorists doing work in critical pedagogy that can be considered as challengersto-traditionalists. In the process the paper identifies fundamental divides in this debate that are, at least with respect to the challengers-to-traditionalists position, either ambiguously characterized or invisible in Searle’s account. With a clearer sense of the fundamental theoretical tensions we can get a clearer sense of how different positions approach the education crisis and the proposals offered to address different aspects of the problem. Furthermore, the paper explores ways to try to move beyond the fundamental divides and move the discussion in the philosophy of education in more fruitful directions by identifying some methodological obstacles in articulating the education crisis. These obstacles inhibit us from considering the roles that colonialism, intermeshing and materiality have in articulating the education crisis and in thinking about responses to it.

Matt Waldschlagel University of North Carolina Wilmington How Not to Think about Forgiveness

75 It is commonly held that the reason we ought to forgive those who wrong or harm us is to overcome the stranglehold that negative—even vindictive—passions have over us. This view is endorsed by Bishop Joseph Butler, who characterizes forgiveness as the act of extinguishing such emotions. For Butler, forgiveness is primarily an internal matter which involves a change in inner feeling more than a change in external action. On Butler’s account, forgiveness is a kind of private rearrangement of the composition of our emotional life that replaces bad blood with inner tranquility and peace. An analog of Butler’s view has found a home in the discourse of pop psychology, where forgiveness is promoted for its alleged positive therapeutic effect on the one harmed or wronged. I argue that Butler’s account is incomplete, as it misidentifies a side-consequence or by-product of forgiveness for the end. I hold that the aim of forgiveness is the moral repair of the relationship between the wrongdoer and the wronged, and I draw upon Margaret Urban Walker’ s theory of moral repair in motivating my account of forgiveness. For Walker, moral repair is the task of restoring and stabilizing the basic elements that sustain human beings in a recognizably moral relationship. Furthermore, Walker treats moral relationship as a way of relating to others that embodies the shared standards, underwritten by trust and hope that everyone in the relationship claims to support. With Walker’ s theory of moral repair in mind, I offer what I call the Threefold View of Forgiveness. In proffering forgiveness, the forgiver must first “soften her heart” by overcoming hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer. However, the imperative to overcome the vindictive passions is treated as directly contributing toward the repair of the moral relationship between the one in the wrong and the wronged, and only indirectly toward any therapeutic effect by which the forgiver may emotionally profit. Second, the forgiver must also actively and patiently work toward reconciliation with the wrongdoer in order to establish what was damaged between them by the wrong or harm. If no relationship existed, then restoring what was damaged may amount to reestablishing the inoffensive indifference that each expressed toward each other in anonymity. Finally, the forgiver must “wipe clean the slate” of the repentant wrongdoer by removing or suspending the wrong. Wiping clean the slate amounts to the forgiver behaving as if the wrong never happened. Each of the three elements in the Threefold View of Forgiveness mutually support the other to facilitate the moral repair of the relationship that the wrongdoer compromised.

Ian Werkheiser Michigan State University Communities and Collective Capabilities Many modern social movements, from La Via Campesina to the growing indigenous peoples' rights movement, make justice claims which require more than mere opportunities for participation or self-determination in decisions affecting relevant individual stakeholders. Rather, these opportunities must be matched by concomitant capacities for the affected stakeholders to exploit these opportunities, or the “opportunities” are merely empty gestures. This complex of real opportunities and internal capacities is well described in the growing literatures found within Capabilities Approaches (CA). However, some of the claims from these groups are not focused on individuals, but often take the community as the relevant locus of injustice, as well as for resistance, participation, and building self-determination. Thus, an

76 understanding of what communities need in order to participate justly and engage in just selfdetermination is an important topic, but one which is underexamined in traditionally individualistic CA. One possible way to addressing these issues is to apply CA to groups, as is occurring in the small but growing body of literature on collective capabilities. The few authors working on collective capabilities provide important reasons why we ought to look at communities' capabilities—community flourishing is a goal of many people for which they will fight if necessary, communities are a way for people to make more individual capabilities real, and membership in a community can provide (depending on the community's capabilities) an array of further collective capabilities which enrich a person's life. Thus many important capabilities which already exist and which ought to be encouraged will be missed entirely by counting up the individuals' capabilities and ignoring the collective's. Such an assessment of collective capabilities is surely possible if one can assess individual capabilities; one need merely look at what the community can do, both in internal capacities and opportunities within social institutions. However, it is unclear if a collective Capabilities Approach is the best way to address the justice issues arising for communities which concern these social movements. This presentation will discuss how thinking about capabilities for communities changes CA. It will then argue that while a collective Capabilities Approach does address some of the individualistic emphasis of traditional CA, it undervalues capacities, specifically the ability of a community to create possibilities for using those capacities when real opportunities are not provided by the dominant society. It will then sketch an alternative framework of looking at community capacities. This work is useful for policymakers trying to understand what justice claims require of them, for activists and community organizers to understand how to best support their communities' flourishing, and for academics thinking through questions of justice and capabilities at the community level.

Christine Wieseler University of South Florida Epistemic Issues in Biomedical Ethics: Ignorance, Knowledge, and Disability In this paper, I argue that the ignorance regarding socially imposed disadvantages as well as the ignorance regarding the perspectives of disabled people is not a simple lack of knowledge; epistemology of ignorance elucidates the ways in which dominant beliefs regarding disability are reified while non-ableist beliefs remain unconsidered. Those who endorse epistemologies of ignorance as a useful framework contend that ignorance, like knowledge, is produced and sustained through power relations. As Anita Silvers puts it, “Because people with chronic pathologies have been a powerless minority, the political pressure to acknowledge their standpoints heretofore has not been great” (2005, 63). Because bioethicists such as Norman Daniels, Christopher Murray, and Peter Singer are so certain that they already know the relationship between disability and quality of life not only do they think of empirical research on the reports of disabled people to be unnecessary, they are so bold as to dismiss the credibility of such research when they are forced to contend with it.

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Charles Mills forcefully demonstrates ways that an epistemology of ignorance has been used to create and maintain inequality on the basis of race. Colonization, racism, and white domination initiated and continue to produce epistemic injustices including denial of epistemic authority and hermeneutic resources to racialized others. Thus, the experiences of people of color are marginalized as sources of knowledge. While there ways that race and disability are not analogous and the categories overlap within experience, I hope to show that there are parallels in the epistemic effects of racism and ableism. In addition, while there are many sorts of harm that may result from dismissal of disabled people’s perspectives, this paper focuses specifically on epistemic harms occurring when disabled people are denied epistemic authority and asked to understand from the perspective of dominant narratives regarding disability. After discussing epistemologies of ignorance and the epistemic harms disabled people face as a result, I will describe alternative ways of thinking about disability articulated by disability theorists and activists. The assumptions that bioethicists tend to make regarding disability conflict with those of disability theorists and activists, leading to tension between these groups. Though this is not always explicitly articulated, bioethicists sometimes assume that their views are apolitical and wholly objective while the views of disability theorists, activists, and disabled people are political and biased. I will draw on feminist standpoint theory in order to show that all knowledge claims, including those of bioethicists, are situated and political. Social location in relation to disability is an important factor in shaping perspectives on disability. I will argue that disabled people and their allies have a privileged epistemic vantage point. Their accounts ought to serve to fundamentally alter the terrain of discussions within biomedical ethics. The burden of proof regarding claims about the quality of life of disabled people ought to be on those whose positions are in line with social prejudices rather than on those who have knowledge of disability based on experience.

Joan Woolfrey West Chester University of Pennsylvania The Primacy of Hopefulness Continuing the scholarship on the concept of hope, and seeing hope—through the lens of virtue ethics—as a requirement for human flourishing, this paper seeks to explore whether or not hopefulness is a somehow more primary or foundational a character trait or disposition then the so-called “cardinal virtues.” This paper, inspired by questions raised by G. Scott Gravlee (2000), seeks to explore whether hopefulness is a necessary condition for the development of virtue, and thus whether it is appropriate to call it a virtue at all. It seems counter-intuitive, if we are to accept hopefulness as a state necessary for virtue, that it then would also be the sort of thing that it is a necessary condition for. We could, alternatively, argue that it was THE foundational virtue through which the development of all others must pass, but that seems counter to the process through which we naturally develop, over time, characteristics identifiable as virtues.